---
template=post
title=My Laptop Server Thing
style=/styles/post.css
style=writing.css
published=2025-06-30 8:05pm CST
description=Briefly, my home server that is a laptop.
art=images/chorus_drives.gif
art_alt=an open laptop sitting on a small table. there are many cables plugged into it.
---
My home server is a laptop I bought from my cousin nearly five years
ago for $60. It has 16 of god's own Gigabytes of RAM and a middling
i5 from 2012. The 3210M if you care. It may only have 2 cores, but hey,
it's got hyper threading, too, so that's 4 threads! How exciting!
My little chorus spends most of the time dormant, it's disks powered down.
They serve files through Samba, occasionally pull
Minecraft server duty, and just generally sit on my network.
chorus had another name once upon a time; when they were in a different
body. Before a laptop on a side table, they were a dual-socket Supermicro
motherboard that never had a proper case (they're like, $200??).
It had some interesting Xeon processor with 16 threads and the minor
part of a terabyte of ram (sixty-four gigs, if you were wondering).
I bought it on craigslist for $240 a few years after the laptop, which
was my main computer at the time.
The Supermicro board was large and unwieldy. It had two notable homes
(other than naked, drives and power supply splayed across the top of my dresser):
A Dollar Store Bin and Fancy Copier Paper Box.
Fancy Copier Paper Box was not too exciting. The motherboard lived
inside and the hard drives lived up top, SATA cables snaking inside.
Dollar Store Bin was similar, but I hold it as more notable and much
more fun! It was a fairly large contraption. The IO was exposed through
holes I "cut" in the side with a heated-by-candle piece of can't-remember-metal.
The board was fixed into place with a single zip-tie through the center
screw hole like a rivet: a head on both ends. When I plugged the 24-pin
cable in, the board would flex downward and I was so, so afraid it would
snap.
The hard drives, though, are my favorite part. Much like Fancy Copier Paper,
the drives of Dollar Store Bin were attached to the top. They were exposed
to the elements and, like the motherboard, zip-tied in place. The kicker,
though, is that the bin lid was not very structurally significant. The drives
made it bow inwards, stressing the connectors as they pressed against the plastic.
It gently vibrated like a silent drum, which is maybe not the ideal situation
for hard drives. Yet they exist to this day, mostly powered down :)
chorus sits on the top of a side table, drives underneath. Each
in an external enclosure with a USB cable meandering up to the system. Aside the
drives is a power strip and an unmanaged, tp-link switch.
Laptop's make ideal servers. They are generally power efficient, they are
small, and they already have a display and keyboard there when you need one.
It's never fun when your server stops responding and doesn't come up after
reboot.
What's even less fun is unplugging the only display from my desktop,
dragging it over to a Supermicro board, and trying to reboot it by lifting
a flimsy plastic lid that has three still-spinning hard drives precariously
zip-tied to then only have to blindly drag a brass key across the front-panel
IO and hope I short the right contacts because I forgot which ones were the
power button again.
I'm not saying it didn't make me smile, but it was Not Good. chorus is
enough for me for now and I would have them no other way.
I was laying in bed once and I heard to drives spin up because a friend
was grabbing some files, and it made me feel closer to them. It's like
when you open a chat with someone and see them typing. You're almost in
the same room and the world feels a little less lonely.