Part 1 of my Homelab Series — building a home server from a broken laptop. The full series lives on my blog.
A Laptop With No Screen
A few months ago, I was cleaning my room and found my old college laptop — a Lenovo Flex 5 from 2019. i7-8550U, 16GB RAM, MX130 GPU, 512GB SSD. Not bad specs even today.
The thing is, it has no screen. The display cracked after a fall, and when I took it to a repair shop, the guy managed to break it completely and said "replacement not found." So it sat in a drawer for years.
The patient — a 2019 Lenovo Flex 5 with a shattered screen but perfectly good internals.
I have a much better laptop now, so this one had no purpose. But 16GB RAM and an i7 sitting idle felt like a waste. The thought clicked — what if I turn this into a home server?
What's Running On It Today
Here's what this screenless laptop now serves 24/7:
| Category | Services |
|---|---|
| Productivity | n8n (workflows), Linkwarden (bookmarks), Memos (notes), NoteForge (dev notes) |
| AI | Ollama + Open WebUI running gemma3:4b locally |
| Media | Kavita (ebooks & comics library) |
| Smart Home | Home Assistant |
| Dev Tools | Gitea (Git + CI/CD), DevToolbox (25+ utilities), Stirling-PDF |
| Infrastructure | Nginx reverse proxy, Cloudflare tunnel, Glances (monitoring), MeshCentral (remote access) |
All accessible from anywhere via custom subdomains, secured through Cloudflare.
The Homepage dashboard — a screenshot of the current state of the server (refreshed roughly every couple of hours).
The Setup in 30 Seconds
The physical setup is dead simple:
- Laptop sits behind the router on a shelf
- Ethernet cable + power supply — that's it
- Windows 11 with Docker Desktop (WSL2 backend)
- 10GB allocated to WSL, 6GB for Windows
No rack, no fancy hardware, no UPS. Just an old laptop doing honest work. For now.
The Journey (and This Series)
It didn't start this clean. The path looked like this:
- CMD window — I honestly thought I'd try this for a couple weeks and abandon it. No point setting up WSL or Docker for a weekend experiment. So each service ran in its own CMD window. It worked for over a month — until a power outage killed everything and I had to restart each one manually.
- Cloudflare tunnel — ISP router had no port forwarding option. Cloudflare Tunnels solved public access without exposing ports.
- MeshCentral — Got tired of plugging in a monitor every time I needed to configure something. Self-hosted remote access fixed this.
- Docker Desktop + WSL — The jump that made everything maintainable. Containers restart themselves, survive updates, and configs are just YAML files.
- Gitea + CI/CD — Push to Git, runner deploys automatically. No more SSH-ing in to update things.
Each of these steps is its own post in this series. I'll walk through the actual setup, the problems I hit, and how I solved them.
What You Need to Follow Along
If you want to replicate this, here's the minimum:
- Any old computer — Laptop, desktop, mini PC. I have 16GB RAM so I can run a dozen+ containers, but only a 2GB GPU so I'm limited to smaller AI models. Your hardware decides your ceiling — not whether you can start.
- Ethernet connection — I started with WiFi and it worked fine. Switched to ethernet later for reliability, but it's not a hard requirement to get started.
-
A domain — I use Cloudflare for DNS. A
.comdomain costs ~$10/year. - Docker — Whether you're on Linux, Windows+WSL, or Mac, Docker is the foundation.
You don't need Linux. You don't need port forwarding. You don't need a static IP. I have none of these and everything works fine.
Why Self-Host?
I'm a software engineer — I work with cloud services daily. So why run things locally?
- Privacy — Notes, bookmarks, PDFs, AI conversations — none of it leaves my house.
- It's fun — There's something satisfying about typing your own domain and hitting a service running 3 feet away from you.
- Learning — Networking, Docker, CI/CD, reverse proxies, Linux — all in one project.
The electricity cost is negligible (laptop idles at ~15W), which is cheaper than any single SaaS subscription.
What's Next
In the next post, I'll cover the first real problem I hit: my ISP router doesn't support port forwarding. I'll show how Cloudflare Tunnels give you public access to your home server without exposing a single port, and why this is actually more secure than traditional port forwarding.
Originally posted on my blog, where the rest of the Homelab Series lives: blog.mavsankar.com
All the code and configurations for my home server are open source: github.com/mavsankar/homeserver
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