[PLUG] Laptop as Server?

[Robert Citek]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 2:21 AM, Tim Wescott <tim at wescottdesign.com> wrote:
> He's of the opinion that a laptop is gonna break if it's left on all the
> time.  I'm of the opinion that it's going to be pretty less heavily
> loaded than if someone were using it (how much can a working household
> with three part-time developers load a server?), and besides it's been
> left on for days on end before now, so get outta the way kid and let me
> work!
> ...
> We can get our feet wet with this without spending any
> capital, and if and when it seems necessary we can shell out some real
> dough for a real machine.)

There's no clear cut answer.  The laptop will break, eventually.  And
there will no way to show whether it was because it was used as a
server or just because its time ran out.  I think you have a sound
strategy by trying it with the intention of moving to a "real" machine
only if necessary.  And that real machine may be an old desktop you
have lying around or a friend wants to toss.

As an anecdote, several years ago we had setup an ssh server for a
small non-profit using Ubuntu Server 6.06 on a lowly 365 MHz Celeron
with 64 MB of RAM and a 3 GB HDD.  We also decided that for easy
expandability and maintainability we would keep things simple: one
partition, swap in a swapfile, labels on filesystems.   By the time
that machine was retired almost 3 years later, it had become a time
server (ntpd), a cron server (crond), a dynamic DNS updater
(ddclient), a proxy server (squid), a web server (apache), a Samba
server, and a DHCP server (dhcpd).  In that entire time, the machine
only went down for kernel updates.  So you don't need much to run a
small local server.

Good luck and let us know how things go.

Regards,
- Robert