Using laptops as servers

Solution 1:

Others have already commented on the disadvantages. I'd like to say a few good things. Advantages to using laptops:

• Power backup - assuming that the batteries still work, they would provide a sort of built-in UPS for the servers.
• Lower power consumption - as you've already mentioned.
• Built in KVM - no need for external monitors/keyboards, assuming the screens still work.

Your machines are more than enough to run web-servers and what nots. So, it is a non-issue. They may even be powerful enough to run as a VM host to become a mini-cluster of small VM machines.

Just a thought.

Solution 2:

Disk will hurt you the most with a laptop, their disk IO is usually about half of an equivalent desktop. Also you don't say how many is in the Si unit of measure "bunch" - if bunch >= 20 then you could have lots of fun with things like MySQL NDB.

Solution 3:

* A web server
* A mail server
* A DNS server
* A file server

First concern is that these are old machines with limited I/O - so the best use you could put these to is in an application where nodes failing terminally and losing their data is very survivable - i.e. as webservers or DNS servers (LDAP servers too) where you are essentially just publishing static information.

If you are receiving data over the web then it does not undermine what is basically a good idea - just keep the data on a reliable shared substrate accessible from all the nodes in the cluster (e.g. a dedicated database or file server).

Edit:

If one of these devices has a probabilty of failure of 1%, and a new machine has a probablity of 0.1%, then two laptops in a cluster have a joint probability of failure of 0.01% - i.e. ten times as reliable as the new machine.

C.

Solution 4:

I think the main problem using laptop as server is about availability of the machines.
In a normal server the most used part is for sure the hard disk. In that case on normal servers you have RAID to save your data from a disk failure.
With a laptop, can you permit yourself to loose data in that case?
I think you could you those laptops for a not critical server as DNS, where data are not changed so often and in case of failure you could count on a secondary server.
Or a web server with a distributed configuration (drdb + heartbeat or openais).
Or for some development machines or to test some new configutaions before apply them to a production machine.