How reliable/realistic is to use a laptop as a remote file backup server?
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
From my experience in the past, ups are done to be constantly on, and as far as I know, usually they have failsafe mechanism in case something is not working as intended. Laptop batteries do not have such extensive protection from what I know. However, if an ups is getting old (around 5 years or so) is probably best to change the batteries (if the model allows it)
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
I have an old HP Omen laptop that I use as a sever, removed the battery because it started getting a bit spicy but other than that it runs just fine for multiple years now.
I use mine as an application server without much storage since it only has space for one nvme ssd and one 2.5" SATA drive.
If you are that far away make sure you have someone with basic Linux knowledge around there to restart it if necessary. And it sucks in LOTS of dust, so be prepared to clean it about once per year
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
My plan is to go there at least once a year, so that would work for me
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
I have actually had headless servers I've ran on a laptop decide to go to sleep with the lid, its an ACPI mode that even framebuffer can decide to respect. IIRC it's not hard to ensure it's disabled somewhere in /proc.
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
Laptops use lithium-ion batteries and (at least your Average Joe's and majority of commercial units too) UPS uses sealed Lead Acid. If lithium ion battery goes belly up it'll burn your house down. If lead acid battery does the same, at worst, it'll leak a bit of corrodive fluids to whatever it's on top of.
There's commercial size li-ion UPS's too, but they require quite a lot of hardware around them to be used safely. Search from youtube (or whatever you like) a cell phone battery explosion and then scale that up to a fridge-sized cell-phone. It's quite a bit of steel and concrete to contain that amount of energy. And the funny thing about li-ion fires is that lithium ions reacts quite violently with water and the battery contains all the chemicals to keep the fire going, oxygen included.
So, yeah, UPS is a whole another thing to manage than a laptop battery.
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
Ahh, okay - it is a different chemistry. I wasn't sure - thanks!
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
I did this with a regular rpi, one of it's io pins and a single npn transistor a while back.
Multimeter to check which power button pin on the mobo is + vs -. - to the rpi gnd, + to the transistor collector, gate to the io pin, drain to rpi gnd.
Whenever the io pin goes high (positive), the transistor shorts the mobo pins 'pressing' the power button.
Script pulls it high for 6 sec to ensure the mobo is fully off, then low for 2 sec, high for 2 sec, then low again.
This was for a system that kept locking up while I was away, so I needed a way to remotely hard-restart it.
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
tlp
has more features available for Thinkpads, specifically, so there's that. I'm thinking more of a laptop form factor but built as a portable server, with the battery specifically designed to be a secondary power source (like a UPS) instead of the primary power source.Of course something like that would be incredibly niche, so it makes sense that it's not really a thing.
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
LiPo batteries should be stored at 3.7V/cell. That's basically ~50% capacity (fully charged is ~4.2V/cell). I have several LiPo cells for my RC stuff, some nearing 10 years old, that are still perfectly usable because of this storage method.
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
A smart switch that turns off the power when the battery hits 80% and turns it on at 78%? Dunno if that would actually work.
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
Yeah I figure it's the sort of thing that requires some firmware support at least.
One thing I've always liked about using laptops as servers more than the battery has been the built-in display and keyboard.
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
I did this for years.
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
The only thing you need to worry about is turning on battery conservation to protect the battery, or removing the battery entirely if your laptop doesn’t support that. Because if you have it plugged in and the battery is at 100% all the time, it’s going to go bad quickly. Bad batteries can sometimes swell up, which could turn into a fire hazard.
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
That's actually a thing some people do, usually with IFTTT or Home Assistant.
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
Good point, those are nice to have. Most of my cluster has vPro capabilities, so I can just log in remotely regardless of the OS's condition.