At one point, I was to set up a continuous integration server at BestBrains. The servers we had ran Linux which was fine for file sharing, subversion and web stuff, but we mostly developed Windows products and the CI server had to run Cruise Control.NET. Although that might actually have been possible with a Mono setup, we decided that it was not worth the trouble and that we would invest in a new server. I suggested that we used a laptop and we laughed about it a little because laptops don’t really feel like server machines. But after thinking it through a little more, we actually ended up doing so. Laptops, we found, have a number of advantages:

• They have low power consumption. This is a good thing for a machine that is always on.
• They’re small. You can close it and put it into a drawer.
• They have built-in UPS’s. Not only does this make them immune to quite long power outages, you can unplug your server and bring it to your desk without shutting it down, if you need to maintain it.
• They don’t make a sound. If you don’t have a dedicated room for servers, this makes all the difference in the world. We did, but we ended up having the CI server in the office, simply because it didn’t bother us at all.

Obviously, I wouldn’t advice you to run a heavy load server on a laptop, but for lighter stuff, it’s really great.

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