Tim Wescott wrote: > I've never tried this, so I have to admit that it's an either/or thing > as far as I'm concerned. I'm interested if anyone has any direct > experience, good or bad, with this.
I'm using an old Latitude as a print server. It was for a time also hosting a FAQ, posting it regularly to Usenet. It being a laptop it has a built-in UPS and power management that will do a sane shutdown. The only downside is that the backlight sometimes comes on when the lid is closed, which has at least once helped to overheat the unit. A $15.00 USB-powered notebook cooling pad solved that problem. A little more fan noise, but much less than a proper server, and much less power consumption overall. I would think that the opposition to using a laptop as a server comes from the notion that a laptop really isn't meant to be used 24/7, where a server is supposed to be designed and built for such demand. But in my personal experience, my laptop-as-a-server is "used" less than one hour per day and is otherwise sitting idle, occasionally responding to rsync for backup and to the update manager. My other laptop is used probably 6 or 7 hours every single day, hosting a variety of programs and a virtual environment, and it is possible that it will fail sooner. That's my opinion, of course, and has no basis in fact. YMMV Larry _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
