My Laptop Server Thing
My home server is a laptop I bought from my cousin nearly five years ago for $60. It has 16 of god's own Gigabytes of RAM and a middling i5 from 2012. The 3210M if you care. It may only have 2 cores, but hey, it's got hyper threading, too, so that's 4 threads! How exciting!
My little chorus spends most of the time dormant, it's disks powered down. They serve files through Samba, occasionally pull Minecraft server duty, and just generally sit on my network.
chorus had another name once upon a time; when they were in a different body. Before a laptop on a side table, they were a dual-socket Supermicro motherboard that never had a proper case (they're like, $200??). It had some interesting Xeon processor with 16 threads and the minor part of a terabyte of ram (sixty-four gigs, if you were wondering). I bought it on craigslist for $240 a few years after the laptop, which was my main computer at the time.
The Supermicro board was large and unwieldy. It had two notable homes (other than naked, drives and power supply splayed across the top of my dresser): A Dollar Store Bin and Fancy Copier Paper Box.
Fancy Copier Paper Box was not too exciting. The motherboard lived inside and the hard drives lived up top, SATA cables snaking inside.
Dollar Store Bin was similar, but I hold it as more notable and much more fun! It was a fairly large contraption. The IO was exposed through holes I "cut" in the side with a heated-by-candle piece of can't-remember-metal. The board was fixed into place with a single zip-tie through the center screw hole like a rivet: a head on both ends. When I plugged the 24-pin cable in, the board would flex downward and I was so, so afraid it would snap.
The hard drives, though, are my favorite part. Much like Fancy Copier Paper, the drives of Dollar Store Bin were attached to the top. They were exposed to the elements and, like the motherboard, zip-tied in place. The kicker, though, is that the bin lid was not very structurally significant. The drives made it bow inwards, stressing the connectors as they pressed against the plastic. It gently vibrated like a silent drum, which is maybe not the ideal situation for hard drives. Yet they exist to this day, mostly powered down :)
chorus sits on the top of a side table, drives underneath. Each in an external enclosure with a USB cable meandering up to the system. Aside the drives is a power strip and an unmanaged, tp-link switch.
Laptop's make ideal servers. They are generally power efficient, they are small, and they already have a display and keyboard there when you need one. It's never fun when your server stops responding and doesn't come up after reboot.
What's even less fun is unplugging the only display from my desktop, dragging it over to a Supermicro board, and trying to reboot it by lifting a flimsy plastic lid that has three still-spinning hard drives precariously zip-tied to then only have to blindly drag a brass key across the front-panel IO and hope I short the right contacts because I forgot which ones were the power button again.
I'm not saying it didn't make me smile, but it was Not Good. chorus is enough for me for now and I would have them no other way.
I was laying in bed once and I heard to drives spin up because a friend was grabbing some files, and it made me feel closer to them. It's like when you open a chat with someone and see them typing. You're almost in the same room and the world feels a little less lonely.