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Highlights

Hardware & software configuration

The old laptop rocks an AMD A8 6410 @2.0GHz CPU with 8GB DDR3 RAM and a 512GB SATAIII SSD. Software side, it runs Proxmox Virtual Environment, a hosted hypervisor on which i configured two separate containers: one for a samba share (of the entire disk) and one for a wireguard VPN (PiVPN).

Network configuration

The laptop is suspended most of the time, and only gets turned on when i want to use it. To accomplish this, an always-on ESP32 microcontroller in the same local networks hosts a telegram bot and is instructed to send a WakeOnLan packet to the laptop if it receives the message /boot.

The ESP32 also handles more complex commands that directly interact with the server, such as starting a proxmox container or vm /start container-id or putting the server back to a suspended state /suspend. To accomplish this, commands of such type are forwarded from the ESP32 to the server through a flask API (the ESP32 basically acts as a trusted relay node).

Pictures

Power consumption

The power consumption of the ESP32 is negligible and the server only uses about 20W on full load, 8W idle, and 2W while suspended. This results in a very low average cost (@ 0.15 €/kWh) of 0.1 € per week.