I’m thinking of picking up an old HP Microserver (gen8) and was wondering if it is a bad idea from a security standpoint.
I mean it’s only 10 years old - is there any exploit or something like that?
What about a N36L Microserver?
I’d probably run Debian headless on it.
I’d only use it for Syncthing and as a backup NAS.
UPDATE
Everybody made really good arguments against the microserver and I won’t be getting one. Thank you for your inputs
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| ESXi | VMWare virtual machine hypervisor |
| LXC | Linux Containers |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| NUC | Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
| SBC | Single-Board Computer |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.
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With hardware like that the main issues are power inefficiency and (often) lack of UEFI support making it hard to install modern distros on them.
Otherwise there should be mitigations for the CPU issues, so unlikely that it will be a real issue from the security perspective.
I know everyone has their own opinions of them but I’m a fan for what they are. Right now I have 3 of them that I’ve gathered over the years (one with ESXi hosting my firewall, one with TrueNas for backups, and one with ProxMox for a few LXCs).
Overall, they are great little boxes, I had three of them in my living room for years when I was renting and they were pretty much completely silent after boot. The dual core celeron that comes with it works, but can be upgraded to a Xeon e3-1265l v2 (quad core + HT) for $25-50. RAM I think maxes at 16GB, but if you want a box to run a dozen light services or so, its not a bad box (insanely quiet and pretty power efficient).
Its not worth the energy cost, honestly. Plus you’ll be quite limited on memory, which reduces the potential uses. Any $200 minipc from the last 5 years would be a better buy.
It can be fine, I’m using a comparable machine, you have to do the math for whether the power bills are worth it. What cpu does it have and how hard do you plan to run it?
