Ideally I would have started documenting this adventure from the very beginning, but alas. I also did not anticipate the degree that I would enjoy setting up my own infrastructure. In hindsight, I definitely should have, given how many hours I spent rebuilding computers and hosting Minecraft servers when I was younger. And thanks to a series of fortunate events I’ve found myself back in the thick of it.
It all started with a junk computer and a dead Synology. That whole story is a saga for another time, but the end result was a mostly successful recovery of ~1TB of photos from a failing RAID5 array, 8TB of usable hard drives, and a fairly capable (albeit old) workstation. But what exactly do you do with a 14 year old computer? Well, according to a friend of mine, you put Proxmox on it and use it as a server.
That recommendation was the point of no return. The moment I typed ‘Proxmox’ into Google, my digital algorithms collectively went “We know what you are”, and suddenly I was watching videos about Home Labs, self-hosting, and hardware repurposing. Honestly, it’s crazy what you can do with some technical skills and literally any computer.
As an example, almost all of the services I’ve setup so far could theoretically run off the Asus c101p I hacked Linux onto (also a story for another time). That’s right, an 8 year old Chromebook can be a half-decent server. Though, I am just running Portainer, n8n, and a Cloudflare tunnel at the moment, which most modern phones could run without breaking a sweat.
Really the point I’m making is: If a beat-up Chromebook can be turned into a mini-server, imagine what you could do with a stack of old laptops, a mini-PC, and an old tower. A lot, you can do a lot. Which I’ll be documenting going forward, but before I can get into deploying anything else, my network situation needs a major overhaul.
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