Transcription

Over the past three years of running this channel, I've built home servers out of all kinds of weird stuff. Computers from fast food chains, mini-PCs that look like graphics cards, heck even motherboards with PlayStation 5 CPUs. But somehow I've never used just a plain old laptop. Which looking back might have been a huge mistake. Because while this might come as a shock, but machines built for long battery life are, well, kind of efficient. So today I'm making up for lost time. I'm turning not one, but three old laptops into home servers in an attempt to essentially rebuild my entire homelab with nothing but laptops. This should be fun. As I often like to do, let's start with the question, why? Well, there are a few reasons. First, as I mentioned earlier, converting a laptop into a server is an idea that gets brought up a lot in comments and video recommendations. In fact, I just recently responded to an email from a viewer that wanted to start building a homelab, but basically all they had to work with was just a pile of old laptops. And while that reminded me that I sort of have a pile of old laptops as well, and I've already considered doing a laptop video in the past, so maybe this could make for a fun video. Also, if we're being frank, money is tight for a lot of people right now. And if you're like me and live in the US, well, computer hardware probably isn't getting cheaper anytime soon. If you're looking to put together a home server on a tight budget, a laptop might actually be a very cost-effective solution. If you want to get really hacky, you might be able to find a laptop with a busted screen for a great deal, or more practically, you might just have an old laptop laying around. I just so happened to have three available and set out to use those as well as the cheap network switch to do my best to recreate my own personal homelab. Oh, and to keep everything nice and organized, I also 3D printed this little stand thing. Now, speaking of keeping things nice and organized, one thing that's always important to keep organized is your inbox, which is much easier to do now thanks to NotionMail, the sponsor of today's video. As much as I love self-hosting, I've never found anything that works nearly as well as Notion. I've been using it for years now basically to run my entire channel, writing scripts, tracking projects, and more. Also recently, I was trying to get my calendar more organized, but I got annoyed with every app until I found Notion Calendar, which is also great. So it didn't come as a surprise to me to find that their newest app, NotionMail, is also extremely useful. Now, AI, marketing, and hype can get way overblown, but NotionMail's tools actually help me get through emails faster. You can tell Notion what's important, and it'll automatically sort and label emails as they hit your inbox. And while I don't love having AI write big, important emails for me, it's perfect for simple, quick replies that you can send with just one click. You can also create little reusable snippets with variables that are incredibly quick to use so you're never typing the same email twice. As a fan of Notion, I also love the custom views where you can group, filter, and sort emails to see exactly what you want to see when you want to see it. Oh, and they also make use of very practical keyboard shortcuts, which for me is a must. Also, NotionMail is built with security in mind. It's SOC 2 Type 1 certified, GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA compliant, and your data isn't used for training. Currently, it's only compatible with Gmail, but you can run NotionMail in your browser, on macOS, and there's an iOS app coming very soon. If you're interested, you can connect your Gmail account for free by using my link down in the description or by scanning the QR code on screen. Now, before we try to set any of these up as servers or anything, let's take a look at what we're working with. Now, I don't want you to click away, so I'll skip those MacBooks for now. So first up, I have this Dell Latitude 7390. I actually picked this up when doing a different Facebook Marketplace purchase for just $40 because the seller told me that the battery wouldn't charge. I ended up just buying a cheap replacement battery for $30, which fixed the issue. So for $70, I feel like I got a pretty solid little laptop. Now, my eventual plan for this is to actually give it away to a family friend that currently doesn't have a computer, but I haven't gotten around to cleaning it up yet, so I figured it would be a nice addition to this project. The 7390 features an Intel i7-8650U, which is an 8th gen, 4-core, 8-thread CPU with a max boost frequency of 4.2GHz, but a base frequency of just 1.9GHz. Mine has one 8GB stick of DDR4, and sadly, there's only one SODIMM socket. It has one Gen 3x4 NVMe socket for an SSD, as well as an E-key slot for Wi-Fi and a B-key slot for an optional cellular modem. I did confirm that the E-key slot does support PCIe, so with an adapter, I could add a short NVMe SSD. It would be limited to a single lane, though, and also would prevent me from putting the bottom of the case back on without cutting out a hole or anything, and since I'm giving this away to someone after this video, I don't really plan on doing that. Also, while you could physically slot in a SATA M.2 SSD into that B-key slot, you still would need a SATA controller to make use of it, so it's not really that helpful. When it comes to I.O., there isn't anything crazy. It has an HDMI out, some USB ports, a barrel jack for power, and gigabit ethernet. Next up is a 2012 13-inch MacBook Pro, which I bought for my freshman year of college, and I know that for some reason, people are still going to get annoyed that I'm using a Mac, even though I bought this way back in college to do music stuff, and that honestly made the most sense back then, and I already have it for free, so it just makes sense, so yeah, I don't know, get over it. This has a much older third-gen i5-3210M, which is just a hyper-threaded dual-core. I'm pretty sure this one currently has a single 4-gig stick, but it does have two SODIMM sockets. One thing I love about these older MacBooks is that you can actually upgrade them quite Obviously, the RAM is upgradable, but you can also swap out the original 2.5-inch hard drive with an SSD, as you can see, I already have. There's also an optical drive that can be swapped out with an adapter, so that you can have a second hard drive or SSD. On the side, there's a MagSafe 1 connector for power, gigabit ethernet, a FireWire port, a Thunderbolt 2 port, and then some USB ports, an SD card reader, and a combo audio jack. Now up next is another 2012 MacBook, but this is the 15-inch model, which has some better specs, which is why I bought this as an upgrade. I'm pretty sure when I bought this, it was already pretty beat up and the Wi-Fi was busted, so I got it for like a good deal, but those holes on the bottom of the case, well, those were my doing. I remember I was trying to get the best performance out of it, and I was being thermal throttled because it's a MacBook, so I had this idea to drill some holes out of the bottom to allow some more airflow, and it was harder than I thought it was going to be, so I think I only did four per fan, but it actually helped a little bit, so hey. Like I said, this 15-inch model has some better specs, with a 4-core, 8-thread, i7-3615G QM, that's a mouthful, and it also has NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M graphics. You can see here that the internals are very similar to the 13-inch model, and you might have noticed that this one does have that optical drive adapter for a second SSD, which I installed way back when this was my daily driver. The I.O. on the 15-inch is basically the same as the 13-inch, it just has split audio jacks. So these are the three systems that I have, but what's the best way to make a little homelab out of them? Now whether your homelab is similar to mine, where you're pretty much just running a few simple services for personal use, or you have a mini data center for learning and exploring IT and networking, a homelab really comes down to just three things. Services, storage, and networking. So my thought was to have one system run Proxmox to handle most containers and VMs, and for this, I figured the Dell, with its more modern CPU, would be the best candidate. For storage, obviously I wasn't going to be able to have something like my TrueNAS server with 80 terabytes of storage, but I don't really need that much storage outside of doing YouTube. So my idea was to leverage those two drive bays in the 15-inch MacBook Pro to be able to have some mirrored drives and run something like TrueNAS. Now if things were more ideal, I would probably set up the third system to be a PFSense or OpenSense router, but none of these have more than just a single NIC. Now I guess I could use a USB adapter, but that seems pretty sketchy, obviously, and I didn't want to dive into configuring VLANs just to use one NIC, mostly because I didn't have another managed switch lying around, so I just decided to avoid doing a router. Instead, I figured the best use case for that second MacBook Pro might be as a dedicated machine to run Home Assistant OS. That way I could leverage things like Bluetooth or ZigBee USB dongles without having to deal with passthrough to a virtual machine. This kind of made sense to me, but I did change my plans once I started diving into things. I started first with the 15-inch MacBook Pro, as it already had that optical drive adapter installed. Now I could have opted for two SATA SSDs, but I also had some 2 terabyte 2.5-inch hard drives and opted to use those for some more capacity. I also upgraded the two 2GB sticks of DDR3 that were in there to two 4GB sticks. Having two hard drives was great for TrueNAS, but that meant I didn't have anything for a boot drive. So I did something a bit weird and opted to use two flash drives and a ZFS mirror. Now obviously using flash drives isn't the best idea, but it was what I had to work with and having two is safer than one. And honestly with TrueNAS, really the most important thing is the pool. As long as you have a good backup of your config, it's pretty easy to just reinstall TrueNAS and then upload your config and you're pretty much good to go. With only two USB ports, I had to use a dongle for the install, and a bit to my surprise, I was able to just hold down option, boot into the installer, and install TrueNAS. It took a while installing to flash drives with a USB dongle, but it eventually finished. Now one issue I did run into was that the two flash drives were a bit too chunky and didn't want to fit nicely together, so I snapped off the plastic case to make it fit. And then because that looked weird, later on I ended up snapping off the plastic case of the other one just so they looked the same. After all that, the system booted into TrueNAS and I was able to set up a mirrored pool, connect to an SMB share, and other than having a warning about using USB drives, everything worked just fine. Until I tried closing the lid, which as I sort of expected, caused the system to go to sleep and then crash. My first thought was to just plug in a keyboard, mouse, and HDMI dummy plug to see if the system would go into sort of a clamshell mode like it would in macOS, but that didn't work. So I poked around online a bit and ended up finding a solution to keep the system from going to sleep when the lid closed. I'll post some links probably down in the description, but essentially you just make some tweaks to this logind.conf file to ignore the lid switch. This kept the system from going to sleep, but the screen was still on, just wasting power. Now I did find some potential solutions to help with turning off the backlight or something, but after seeing a lot of videos of people repurposing these MacBooks that literally didn't have a screen at all, I decided to just unplug the display connector entirely. Without a display, the system still booted into TrueNAS, but was now consuming quite a bit less power, idling at just 25 watts, compared to around 33 watts. Now 25 watts isn't incredible, especially for a laptop, but I did have a working TrueNAS server so I decided to move on to installing Proxmox. On the Dell Latitude, I swapped out the SSD, and then I also upgraded the 8GB FDDR4 with a 16GB stick I had. I got Proxmox installed just fine, but once again had a lid switch to deal with. I was able to make the same tweaks to the logind.conf file, but since the system was already idling at just around 6-7 watts, I didn't think the risk of potentially damaging the display connector was worth it. Instead, I decided to just try and turn off the backlight to conserve some power. I ended up just writing a one-line script that essentially just wrote a zero to this backlight brightness file, and then I set it up on a cron job to run every few minutes. And I did this rather than having the script run whenever the system booted, so that when you first turn the system on if you needed to make a few tweaks, you could without the screen just going completely dark. And to my surprise, that 6-7 watts at idle literally dropped down to just 3.5 watts. Which yeah, this is a laptop, it's supposed to be efficient, that makes sense. But dang, 3.5 watts is still really impressive. And this made me start questioning my choice with that 15-inch MacBook Pro. I had a feeling that the higher power draw might be at least partly due to that Nvidia GPU and maybe even the i7 to an extent. So I decided to pull all of the drives and RAM from the 15-inch system and swap it over to the 13-inch system, which as I said, is basically the same internally. After booting back into TrueNAS on the 13-inch MacBook, power draw wasn't as impressive as the Dell system, but it was still significantly lower, sitting at around 15-16 watts. Now at this point I could have proceeded to install Home Assistant OS on the 15-inch MacBook, but I just felt like the perks of having a dedicated Home Assistant box wouldn't outweigh literally doubling my total power draw. Honestly, if this were my actual home lab, I just probably wouldn't use that third MacBook at all. I'd probably just try to sell it for, I don't know, like $50 or something and then use that towards something that I could configure for a PFSense box or something. But just scrapping this would probably make this video feel a bit lame, and while honestly I had already spent a bit of time designing this little stand specifically for three laptops and it took like 15 hours to 3D print, so I decided to just find a use for it. The best idea I could come up with was to buy another one of those cheap SSD adapters, drop in the two SSDs I didn't use for the TrueNAS box, and then install Proxmox Backup Server. And having a single SSD for my Proxmox server meant that, well, all of my services could get wiped out with just a single drive failure. So Proxmox Backup Server could be a good solution, and having a good backup might be worth doubling the power draw, I guess. With all the operating systems installed, I threw all three systems into my 3D printed stand, along with a cheap little gigabit switch, which all fit in quite nicely. And honestly, I feel like it turned out looking pretty clean. As long as you don't look over there, ignore that. Yeah, just keep looking at this part. This looks nice. In all seriousness, I had planned to organize the power cords a bit more because I also planned on hooking them up to a UPS, but the UPS I was going to use is hooked up to my 3D printers, and I was dumb and accidentally started a different 3D print that I didn't want to cancel, so I just didn't get around to doing that. Now that does remind me of one thing I forgot to mention. One potential benefit of using laptops that I hear all the time from people in the comments is that they essentially have a built-in UPS thanks to the battery. And this is, well, sort of true. A battery can keep the system up and running in the case of a relatively short power outage. That being said, I think there are potentially some concerns, though, about having a battery constantly on mains power that might not be monitored regularly. To be honest, I don't really know how much of a risk there is with this, but maybe look into it some more, or just regularly check your batteries to make sure they're not swelling or anything if you plan on doing something like this long term. I don't actually have any plans of running this long term, but honestly, I don't think it would be that bad. It was a little bit of a pain to turn on the MacBook specifically because I couldn't get to the BIOS or anything to configure Wake on LAN or Wake on Power. Because they have batteries, you could just unplug them, hit the power button, and then plug them back in, and they were good to go. With TrueNAS, I had already essentially set up everything I needed, so I hopped back over to Proxmox. Using the Proxmox community scripts, I quickly set up some of the main services I use like Jellyfin, Crafty Controller, Tailscale, and Home Assistant. In my Jellyfin LXE, I was able to mount shares from TrueNAS and also had no issues getting the integrated graphics working for hardware-accelerated transcoding. The transcoding performance wasn't anything to write home about, but was good enough for some 4K HDR content with VPP tone mapping. As per usual, I set up a vanilla Minecraft server in Crafty, which, well, aside from getting a really annoying spawn, worked flawlessly, and I imagine this would work just fine for a small server for your family or a few friends. I also got Tailscale set up and running on my TailNet, and I also had a working Home Assistant box. I mean, really, this just worked fine for everything I would typically run on a Proxmox server. I also connected Proxmox to that Proxmox backup server, and was able to run a backup of one of my LXE containers as a proof of concept. And while doing all of this, the entire setup was drawing a little under 50 watts at idle, and the highest I ever saw it jump up to was around 80 watts or so. Plus, it was basically dead silent the entire time. It definitely took some tinkering to get there, but overall, I'm pretty happy with where things ended up. Now, clearly, the MacBook Pros would not be my first choice, and unless you already have one or get one for free, I would not choose one for a janky laptop server build. The Dell Latitude was a much better system with its incredibly low power draw, more modern specs, and it also just isn't as locked down so you can get to things like the BIOS settings. That being said, having room for two 2.5-inch drives can definitely be nice. I obviously can't guarantee how well any of the thousands of laptop models you might find will perform, but you might just find one to be a great low-budget option for a little server build. In general, they're probably going to be more efficient than most desktops. They also don't take up that much space, and there's a decent chance you might already have one collecting dust, or you can find one that's maybe a bit busted up for super cheap. That being said, there are plenty of downsides. Having to potentially open and shut them just to power them on can be pretty annoying, and the form factor might be a bit awkward. You also have to deal with the lid behavior and the display, and while mine were pretty easy to work on, depending on the model, maintenance might be pretty difficult. These three laptops definitely aren't going to replace my home lab anytime soon, but at the same time, I don't think running a laptop as a system for home assistants or to run some docker containers or something is crazy. If you're on a tight budget or live somewhere where power costs are insane, something like that Dell Latitude might make a ton of sense. What do you guys think, though? Do you think a laptop is a good idea, a terrible idea? Do you have any experience running laptop servers of your own? Let me know down in the comments, I'd love to hear from you guys. Also, I hope you enjoyed this video, and if you did, maybe consider giving a lipe. Lipe. That's not the right word. Maybe consider giving me a like, maybe consider subscribing, or becoming a raid member for as little as a dollar a month. With that, you can get ad-free access to all of my videos, I think that's a pretty good deal. That's about it for this one, so as always, thank you guys so much for watching, stay curious, and I really can't wait to see you in the next one.