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It'll probably work. Biggest issue will be recovery after power failure as laptops generally stay off.
Next most likely is CPU fan failure, exacerbated if CPU usage causes the fans to run high and nobody is there to blow the dust out.
Other than that I've had multiple laptops that run as servers over the years and generally they're fine. Streaming audio for our community radio station, or shoved behind wall mounted TV's for updateable PowerPoint displays.
Yeah, what they said.
OP, invest in a UPS - cheap or less cheap - you can get them as big as your bank account, and they're worth it. I tend to like Cyberpower for price, because they're common enough that I've never found a model that nuts didn't already know about, and they tend to have replaceable batteries. As parent said, the nightmare is if power goes out, and even though the laptop has a battery, you're buying yourself extra time. Plus extra surge protection and all that.
I'm not probably saying anything you don't already know, OP, but I feel there's a general under-valuing of UPSes when I hear about people's set-ups. They may mention a surge protector, but rarely do I see folks taking about their UPSes.
I actually have contingencies for this. There is a ups around that I can use. It is good advice for sure, specifically for countries with fluctuations on the electric grid
It would be nice if there was firmware available for the charge controller that turned the laptop's own battery into a UPS, avoiding the whole "spicy pillow" debacle.
One can dream...
A smart switch that turns off the power when the battery hits 80% and turns it on at 78%? Dunno if that would actually work.
I've got an old HP laptop which I've been running a Jenkins server on for years. The fan died back in like 2018, and I just kept putting off buying a replacement, so it has been running with no fan for 7 years now. Remarkably it still works fine, although a but slower than it used to thanks to thermal throttling :P
I am planning after installing Ubuntu server and get some setup done, to actually sit it out and understand how much the fan is going and how I expect this to be an issue. Since my backups are probably going to be once in a week or so, I do not expect the laptop to have a lot of work (for now is just for file backup, no other services in there except tailscale)
It's a laptop... One of the benefits is that it already has a battery, no?
If the laptop has a way to limit charging to, say, 70% in order to not turn into a spicy pillow, it would be viable. I have an older HP Elitebook 8440p laptop running as a server of sorts in my cluster, but the battery is no longer capable of holding a charge at all because it's always plugged in. I might get a Thinkpad to replace it as there are modifications for those to limit the battery charge level.
Firstly - I love the phrase "spicy pillow".
Secondly - It would probably depend on the laptop and its battery health. But also the OS can limit charging I believe? I haven't looked too far into how it works but I've got my laptop setup to only charge to 90% because I'm nearly always plugged in. I don't know if that relies on any hardware/firmware options though.
tlphas more features available for Thinkpads, specifically, so there's that. I'm thinking more of a laptop form factor but built as a portable server, with the battery specifically designed to be a secondary power source (like a UPS) instead of the primary power source.Of course something like that would be incredibly niche, so it makes sense that it's not really a thing.
Yeah I figure it's the sort of thing that requires some firmware support at least.
One thing I've always liked about using laptops as servers more than the battery has been the built-in display and keyboard. 😁
That is true, however there are 2 things
Fair.
I'm not clear on how a UPS would be different in this regard. They both have high-capacity batteries that need monitoring. Unless the UPS is using a different chemistry?
Laptops use lithium-ion batteries and (at least your Average Joe's and majority of commercial units too) UPS uses sealed Lead Acid. If lithium ion battery goes belly up it'll burn your house down. If lead acid battery does the same, at worst, it'll leak a bit of corrodive fluids to whatever it's on top of.
There's commercial size li-ion UPS's too, but they require quite a lot of hardware around them to be used safely. Search from youtube (or whatever you like) a cell phone battery explosion and then scale that up to a fridge-sized cell-phone. It's quite a bit of steel and concrete to contain that amount of energy. And the funny thing about li-ion fires is that lithium ions reacts quite violently with water and the battery contains all the chemicals to keep the fire going, oxygen included.
So, yeah, UPS is a whole another thing to manage than a laptop battery.
Ahh, okay - it is a different chemistry. I wasn't sure - thanks!
From my experience in the past, ups are done to be constantly on, and as far as I know, usually they have failsafe mechanism in case something is not working as intended. Laptop batteries do not have such extensive protection from what I know. However, if an ups is getting old (around 5 years or so) is probably best to change the batteries (if the model allows it)