Comment by 🐦 wasolili
Re: "Self-hosting with an old laptop"
Should I run the server over a VPN, or even go Tor-only, for personal safety reasons?
It depends on what your safety concerns are. If you just don't want people who visit your capsule to get your home ip address, you could use your cheap vps as a reverse proxy.
2025-12-24 · 4 months ago
2 Later Comments ↓
I have a play server running on a laptop from 2014, so yeah, it's a fine idea!
Personally I *do* have ssh running on it, but I *don't* have the ssh port forwarded in from the outside internet. I can only ssh in from within my home network.
Also, my laptop's DVD drive stopped working for years, but turned out it was because the battery was getting puffy and pressing on it. My touchpad also started getting glitchy for the same reason. Replacing the battery fixed that.
👤 travisshears · Dec 25 at 06:48:
Since you already have a VPS, probably with static IP, I would route all public traffic though it. Then connect both it and the old laptop to a VPN like Tailscale. Host the apps on the laptop say with docker. That’s my setup.
Original Post
Self-hosting with an old laptop — I have a piece of hardware which I do not intend to use as a desktop machine ever again. It's a cheap and shitty HP laptop from 2019. AMD A6 processor, 8GB of RAM, 1TB spinning hard disk, and a DVD drive that hasn't worked in over a year. Since I have hardware from 2007 that is nicer to use than this machine, I was thinking of turning it into a server. I'd probably either install Proxmox, Alpine, HardenedBSD, or OpenBSD, and spin up a couple of lightweight...