Repurpose your old laptop as a homeserver

One of the most satisfying activities I did this year was putting my old laptop to work again as a homeserver to host all of my websites and more. It was a useless laptop and I hadn't used it in years. I hadn't used it much because it didn't have a working display. Or a (functional) keypad. Or a (usable) trackpad. Or a (stable, without cracks and sticky tapes) body. What it did have was 8GB RAM, 8th Gen i5 processor, a tiny MX-series NVIDIA GPU, and a fresh SSD that made it (slightly) usable; if used as a stay at home PC.

After hosting my server on DigitalOcean for a couple of years, and hearing my FOSS friends talk about how good static IP is, I couldn't help but feel FOMO. I finally did get a static IP and now I am saving around Rs 1000 each month on DigitalOcean costs that I no longer need to pay. On top of that, even this humble specification of 8GB RAM and i5 is beefy in VPS-land. It would've cost me $48 on DigitalOcean, and even if there are cheaper options, they can't be cheaper than [insert static IP + electricity cost].

In this talk, I'll walk through the steps I took, where I got stuck, and what I chose to do to work around it. Hopefully, this will get you to finally do the same to your trashy old laptop (or a new Rasperry Pi... there's no excuse).

I'll also walk through my homeserver in the terminal - to demonstrate hacks that I found useful.

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What I would particularly like to share in this talk is the logistics of running a laptop at home, 24x7. You'll need to learn Linux, but that I (and better teachers than me) have covered before.

• Getting a static IP from your ISP
• When your LAN cable isn't long enough. I just use Wi-Fi, but there's some extra OS steps needed
• Migrating from another VM? It was easier than I thought. Bunch of scp + rm -rf
• SSH-ing but only from your devices VPN with Tailscale / Headscale
• Firewalling? OK, honestly, I could only figure out port-forwarding from my router page. I only forwarded 80/443. No firewall needed.
• Heat? Keep it upside down (Arya said so)'
• Power? UPS!

Why would you want to self host in the first place?

Good question. You can:

• Over-engineer your note-taking setup. Set up Syncthing on all your devices on the Obsidian notes folder. Then add a cron job to push your notes to a self-hosted Git server every day
• Share embarassing videos only with the intended friend, and not Google, Meta, and AI algorithms
• Get Linux and shell script practice on a. weekly basis
• Host your own permanent ngrok
• Host your own LLMs?