Steps to repurpose old laptop as home server with Debian
https://lemdro.id/post/13765030
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The easiest way to disable unnecessary services is to uninstall them with aptitude, or whichever package manager you like. Try terminating services one by one, and see if anything bad happens. If nothing bad happens, you can probably uninstall it. On the other hand, if the system does get wonky a reboot should fix it. Or, you can research the services by name and decide whether to uninstall them. (avahi-daemon for example is a good idea to uninstall.)
To make the GUI not run, uninstall your display manager (gdm, xdm, nodm, or whatever) and uninstall your xorg server or wayland server. There may be GUI programs remaining after that, but they will only be consuming disk space, not RAM or CPU.
If the battery is old and holds little charge, you may save a few watts by removing it and throwing it away, instead of letting the system keep it topped off.
Get a power meter, such as a Kill-a-watt device. Then, experiment with different settings. If it’s consuming less than 30 watts, you’re probably fine. If you live in the US, one watt-year is about one US dollar (or a little more), so for every watt it consumes, that’s about how much you will pay per year for its electricity.
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Thanks. I installed Cockpit and disabled a couple of unnecessary services.
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I usually do the expert install and don't install a graphical environment in the first place. But your solution should be fine, too. I think you can show running services with systemctl and then disable unneeded ones. For example systemctl disable gdm but there shouldn't be that much running on a plain Debian anyways.
For powersave I run ` powertop in auto-tune mode as a systemd service. A description is here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Powertop
Unfortunately, the Debian Wiki doesn't seem to have a lot on laptop power saving. The Arch wiki has some more (random) info: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management
I'd say do the powertop systemd service on startup, set the multiuser target or disable the login manager and that's it.
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In case you didn’t already do that: remove the battery. It’s probably dead anyway, you don’t need it and it poses a potential (albeit low) risk.
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Depends. Usually it is still good as a UPS for a few minutes, and some laptops have a bios option to limit full charge which lowers the risk even further.
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And how much need is there for a UPS in this scenario - realistically.
Some of the people here take their admin-LARPing a tad too seriously. Most households have reliable enough electricity, and even if there’s an outage once every quarter, would a dead battery even help?
I advocate for being realistic with one’s own needs. Don’t build a five-nines datacenter for a glorified weather station or VCR.
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That is why I said it depends. There are many places where the electricity cuts quite frequently for a short duration. Often you don’t even notice it, but a 24/7 server would be effected.
In general, I think the risk of laptop batteries catching fire is overstated especially if you limit the charge to 80% or so. So weighting these two issues against each other you can come out either way, but I think for most places it will come down towards a UPS being nice to have.
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Everything has pros and cons. I've seen 3 laptops (of my family) with batteries that looked like a baloon after several years. I've subsequently removed or replaced them. I'd definitely check on them every now and then. A UPS is nice. Burning down a house isn't. I haven't seen them catch on fire (yet), they supposedly have at least some protection. But definitely get them out of the laptop once they look not okay or stop working (for more than 5 minutes) anyways. Everyone is responsible to do that decision on their own. Take care.
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Worth taking a look at the battery - especially an old one on a repurposed device - before considering it safe. Spicy pillows happen.
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The nice thing about some battery backup is not keeping it running during an outage, but safely shutting it all down.
I agree on the laptop battery, I’m just disagreeing on battery backup. It serves a purpose, as does decent surge elimination.
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But not for us.
That’s what I meant by larping. The vast vast majority of us here would probably not even notice if their systems went down for an hour. Yes, battery backup has its purpose. In a datacenter.
I mean, what’s on the line here in the worst case? 15min without jellyfin and home assistant? Does that warrant taking risks with old batteries or investing in new ones?
That equation might change if you’re in a place with truly unreliable electricity, but I guess those places have solutions in place already.
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No, hard disagree.
I have many thousands of dollars worth of hardware. I have seen the results of a surge. I have seen a NAS reduced to a paper weight. You’re making incredibly silly assumptions here - this has nothing to do with uptime, and everything to do with protecting your equipment.
You will not ever convince me otherwise, because I’m not willing to dump thousands of dollars on replacements because someone on the internet thinks it has anything to do with uptime.
You are wrong.
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Oh come on, are you really that boneheaded not to understand that you’re not the norm?
I literally had not a single power surge in my entire life. The only power outages I had were for a few minutes maybe three times in the last 15 years.
The larping refers to you. Either you are truly an outlier who actually runs a small DC, or you just like the feeling you can get pretending to do so.
Your attitude is roughly the “only gold plated cables made from solid silver” equivalent in audiophiles. Technically maybe correct, practically a self-important waste of money.
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Its not correct actually, there will never be a difference in audio message in any of those cables you’re talking about, that’s marketing nonsense. The biggest risk to audio signals is induction caused by nearby power, run parallel for more than 3’ within inches of each other. Regardless.
And yes, you’ve had surges. You won’t notice them in general, but your line is not going to be a perfect 120V at each outlet at all times. If you have a cheap surge protector and open them up, the MOVs in there have degraded, and I bet a few of them have popped if you have used them long enough. Everything looks fine when the lights come back on, the blinky lights on your hardware start blinking, but you just had a surge.
Your power supplies in those electronics will.
They will degrade faster when those minor surges and drops happen. When you have a brownout or a blackout, when the power comes back there is an in rush of current.
You can choose to let your hardware die faster because you don’t want to take basic precautions, I don’t care. But as someone who knows better, I won’t. You say you’ve never had any surge? You probably think that a surge is just a lightning strike or something, which it isn’t. That, like the gold plated cables nonsense, is also marketing junk. In part because those crappy MOVs in cheap surge strips can’t handle an actually large surge
I’ll also take the extra step of making sure my devices shut down cleanly, avoiding data loss, because that’s an unnecessary problem to have.
You can think whatever you want, but I’m not going to waste my money replacing hardware or my time fixing an installation, especially for something that’s a tiny fraction of the cost of the devices its connected to, regardless of what magical electrical service you claim to have that’s always a perfect 120v delivered to every outlet.
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We have blippy power in the windy season, a 1 second outage was enough to trash hardware, not to mention dirty power you may not visibly notice. My UPS kicks in every few weeks for a few seconds to provide clean power when the utility is falling short or over volting.
Having a battery take over is super helpful
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you speak for everyone in here? OP doesn’t even mention jellyfin or HA. are you an asshole irl or just larping here as one?
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Most households have reliable enough electricity
US defaultism in action, it seems.
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The US default, that I never left Europe. What an achievement for the USA!
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This is true, the USA is better and it is invading your soul.
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US power sucks plenty!
Texas is an extreme example, but outages happen everywhere. It was only a bit over 10 years ago when Sandy basically hit half the US and took power out in the tristate area for weeks. With climate change making things worse…
But even when things are running well, not including the random downed line or busted transformers, its still better to give your hardware clean power and avoid the small spikes.
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Thanks. Yeah I’ll do that. Is it also possible to enable auto power on after power outage and restore? My celeron mini pc has this feature.
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That’s typically a feature for servers or business desktops. Maybe your laptop has it, just look into the BIOS.
As I wrote in my other comment: try to be realistic about your needs. Chances are, pressing the power button every few months (if at all) is perfectly fine for your use case (and most others here).
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I would just do a minimal reinstall if you had used this as a personal computer OS before
And also take the battery out
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I install KDE Plasma on devices I intend to use as a server. If the PC is easily reachable you can use the GUI to quickly manage files or use the terminal. Disable search indexing if you install GNOME or Plasma.
I never used Debian but I assume the base system is as clean as it can be.
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It would be useful to know laptop spec. In general, do not bother power consumption should be lower enough as it is.
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It’s a Thinkpad 11e with AMD A series A4-6210 (1.8 GHz), 8GB RAM, 120GB SSD, AMD Radeon R3.
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A4-6210 with build in GPU has TDP of 15W. There is no point to optimize anything it is seeping power already. may be try to use tlp to limit max charge level of the battery ( i’m not sure is you laptop is supported). You can play with governors too, but I personaly will not bother. You obviously need multiuser.target but not GUI.
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