curious how long a lenovo thinkcentre basement server will live for and what will be the astrology on the day of its last breath
i've been self-hosting most of the software I use since ~2020, but this summer I switched to running things off of a lenovo thinkcentre in the basement instead of on a digital ocean droplet
the server is running smoothly 24/7 and seems "undisturbed". nothing happens in the basement. its in a way sort of hard to imagine that one day it would just stop, but also obviously it wont continue forever
also would be curious how much different patterns of use (reading and writing) would effect its lifetime
in particular wondering if letting it "sleep" at night or part of the time would extend its lifetime, or if rebooting causes more "wear" in some way, if that makes sense
Your IP address will change. So you need dynamic DNS.
Your DNS will expire if you don't pay for it.
Your disk can fill up and have no more space to write.
The SSD will also wear out eventually, proportional to how much you write to it. Usually this comes from stuff like web servers that log requests combined with AI scrapers and search indexers that sometimes go nuts and send an unbounded # of requests.
You can check the health status of the disk with the `smartmontools` package `smartctl` command. Look for where it says "remaining lifetime %" or "wearout indicator %" or something like that.
But AFAIK, besides those things, death from old age is incredibly rare for computers. Most just keep on running long after they become obsolete (costs more to pay for electricity to run it than it would cost to get a new one that does the same job and uses less electricity)
Altho, who knows what will happen in the future -- we may have hit some sorta fundamental limits in terms of energy efficiency of computers.
thanks @forestjohnson , appreciate this pretty comprehensive look at at what could go into server "end of life"
didn't realize that about electric efficiency, but makes sense. making me curious to measure some of the electricity used by different old servers ive found for comparison