Archive for July 23rd, 2004
Laptops as Web Servers
Friday, July 23rd, 2004
or, Why Laptops Make Perfect Web Servers
I’ve been using my laptop as a testing server (for this site and others) for quite a while now. It’s an IBM ThinkPad R31 running Apache2 with PHP and most of the useful extensions. I have a dyndns address for it, but I’m not going to tell anyone what it is because it is running Windows, after all, and I’m not confident that it’s the least bit secure. But I have come to realize that a laptop is an ideal web server for several reasons:
- It has a built-in battery. That means that if the power goes out (aside from the fact that my router will turn off) the server will still be running. Also, and more importantly, it means that I can arbitrarily move it to anywhere in the house without having to shut it off, and,
- It has WiFi, which means that if I move it around the house, it never loses the connection. It’s fully self-sufficient for up to 3 hours (ish). And 11Mbps is 10 times faster than my connection, so no bottleneck there.
- It’s really really small. I mean, you could fit 4 of these things in a 1U rack. That’s pretty compact. I keep mine standing upright in the crack between the desk and the wall, and access it with TightVNC.
- It uses very little power, by design. It has to run off a battery, so its drain on the power line is tiny compared to a desktop or rackmount server. A standard APC battery backup could last for days for a laptop (guessing). And then you get 3 hours of battery after that!
- And the built in screen is nice. Never have to worry about which systems display is which; it’s attached!
Of course, there are many drawbacks — performance being the main one. Dual processors are most definately not an option on a laptop. Neither is a RAID array of redundand hard disks (speaking of redundancy…). And even memory is limited, though you can probably pack a gigabyte of RAM into most laptops these days. I doubt we’ll ever see laptops in data centers working as servers, but if you’re looking for a good testing server, slap Apache and PHP on your laptop and stash it in the corner.