I have an old laptop lying around and I have been meaning to self host some stuff on it but never got around to it.
My biggest limitation is that I only have WIFI and I do not control the network. It’s basically your default residential WIFI network.
The only thing I actually need is self-hosted cloud. What can I utilize this laptop for?
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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) nginx Popular HTTP server
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.
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When you say WiFi to you mean that you only have WiFi access or does the labtop not have a Ethernet port? If you have a wired connection I would get either a thunderbolt or usb3 adapter to hardwire it as a hardwired connection will be more stable even on USB speeds.
The OS will depend on what you want to host. If its a older system with less than 8 GB of ram I would just install Debian with docker. You can find premade docker compose files online which should make deploying software easy.
If you have plenty of hardware you could install Proxmox and then a few VMs.
Edit2:
Actually I take back what I said, don’t use Kubesail. I went back and tried it and it has a lot of issues. If you want remote access consider a VPN or remote vm
What are the advantages of kubesail? I couldn’t understand it form their website
Never mind, I actually am taking back what I said.
I ended up trying it. In theory it’s all nice and useful, because it solves the part that I am not comfortable with (router settings, domains and other connection stuff). But then I don’t know Kubernetes so I couldn’t understand what I was doing and I was not able to troubleshoot it. And I could not connect to my server remotely anyway.
And that’s the reason I am taking back what I said. At the end of the day wireguard is your friend.
I starter my home server with a laptop. I did nextcloud, paperless, jellyfin + *arr services, photoprism, and a few others.
Not having control over your network is the biggest hurdle because you kind of need a fixed IP to access it.
However, there are some services to broadcast your hostname to the local network (e.g. so you can log in with serveruser@myserver over SSH).
You may be able to use that to access your containers from the network, but just keep in mind that other users on the local network can also access your server.
Fixed IP doesn’t matter today with virtual/mesh network approaches like Wireguard/Tailscale.
They open an outbound connection, so the router treats it like any other connection. Once the tunnel is established, inbound comms can take place.
Using Tailscale’s Subnet Router enables access to local devices that can’t run a TS client, while the
Serve andFunnel options enable external access from devices that don’t have the TS client installed. Edit: Serve is for sharing to TS clients that aren’t part of your TS network.It’s really interesting to see these solutions today, when Hamachi was doing it 20 years ago. Glad to see it’s caught on, and being developed/extended.
Without being able to set a static ip and forward ports you cant host services and point to them with a domain, like driveway-home.com or something.
But I think cloudflare has a service that lets you connect remotely without needing static ip’s (some one else will know the name). If you were to use that then you can use your laptop to host pretty much anything on the Awesome Selfhosted List.
I would advise against port forwarding without at least a proper firewall with isolation. It is very very dangerous to expose things to the internet and it will backfire at some point, sometimes without your knowledge.
Back when I first started I used a service called kubesail https://kubesail.com/
Now that I have way more hardware I just use a VPS on Linode to route traffic.
I think self-hosted cloud is a vague statement, but I think with your network infrastructure you will be limited in what you can do. I think cloudflare tunnel could be a good option for getting the device available online.
Then the self-hosted part. There are so many things you can look into. You can run everything in Docker, install the software you want directly on your laptop, and much more.
You’ll likely also need a reverse proxy. Can use nginx proxy manager, traefik, or something similar for that.
What are your goals with the self-hosted cloud? That would help you in making it easy to find resources and others here to give you advice.
Edit: typo’s
What are your goals with the self-hosted cloud?
I have about several dozen GB of files that I currently sync with Syncthing between my devices. The only downsides I can see is that it takes the same amount of space on all my devices and it’s hard to add a new device to the group. I’d like to store the files on the laptop instead and be able to browse, access them from my other devices (mainly Linux and Android), ideally through the internet.
Switch to Resilio Sync, it has a sync-on-demand feature called Selective Sync, where you can browse the share and select files to sync now.
It’s a feature of Resilio I really like, but I rely on Syncthing for daily use because Resilio kills phone memory (it stores the index in ram), and it’s much more resource intensive on my file server.
Dozens of GB sounds like there’s a lot of media files to me. I’d not share that via Syncthing. Assuming that is correct: Wouldn’t a media server like Jellyfin be a better fit? Or if it’s photos, I recommend Immich. Note that Immich is under active development and should not be your only place to store photos.
You can, but if you don’t control the main router and can’t do any port forwarding, it will be hard to make it accessible from outside your LAN.
One thing that might work is uPnP to open ports.
