[AltecXP]

I was planning to buy a used MacBook with a dead LCD off of ebay and us it for a headless/built in battery backup, DNS, blog, and Email server.

I'd get a new Mini but I don't want to spend that kind of money and the MacBook can be had for under $400.

Anyone have any ideas on why I SHOULDN'T do this?

[besson3c]

Plenty, depending on things...

1) If you will be hosting your blog out of your home, will it need a fair amount of upload bandwidth to serve your traffic? Same question for accessing your email mailboxes remotely

2) Are you comfortable with starting up VNC/X11 forwarding/RDP via the command line?

3) Do you have a secondary/tertiary DNS server?

4) Are you comfortable with port forwarding, or will this machine have its own IP address?

5) Will you have a backup for your email mailboxes?

[AltecXP]

1) It will be hosted out of my home, I t wont need much bandwidth, no one cares what I think. :-p

2) I have done this a LITTLE bit, mostly just maintaining systems at work, but would love to be come more familiar with it.

3) I'll be running a 2nd DNS off of a Linux VM on my main computer.

4) I will be port forwarding for now, It may be its own IP if it gets much more traffic than I expect.

5) I plan to have 2x 500GB HDD's in RAID1 in the laptop and an external backup.

[shifuimam]

Also keep in mind that hosting at home is a violation of your ISP's TOS in almost all cases, and if you don't have a static IP, your domain is going to stop working every time your IP changes - and registrars really hate it when you change a domain's IP more than a few times.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by shifuimam 

Also keep in mind that hosting at home is a violation of your ISP's TOS in almost all cases, and if you don't have a static IP, your domain is going to stop working every time your IP changes - and registrars really hate it when you change a domain's IP more than a few times.

You could get around this by making the domain a CNAME/alias to a dynamic DNS hostname...