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2026-06-23: Zero-budget homelab

As I've written before, I have always on on my home network a Raspberry Pi with which I can wake-on-lan the home server. We'll, the Raspberry Pi sits redundant, and the home server is no longer a server, just a CD-ripping, VHS-digitizing, backup-hosting PC. Why? Because in a bout of e-waste hoarding, I got an HP EliteBook 840 G4 for free (well, the dock was 8 € used, locally).

I had been wanting to upgrade the "always on" machine to something more powerful than the Raspberry Pi, and this fit the bill nicely. Laptops are, by design, energy efficient and, consequently, silent. People also rave about laptops as servers due to the built-in KVM and the built-in UPS. Now, I do agree with the KVM, but the first thing I did to this machine was to remove the battery. I'd rather not have a lithium-ion pillow on charge 24/7, spicing itself up. And besides, if the main use is to serve files, what does it accomplish that the server stays on during a power cut when the router goes down anyways?

Besides removing the battery, the other hardware change I made was to add the 4 TB SSD from my main PC to the spare SATA bay in the laptop. I was even so brazen as to not reformat it at all, all the files I had on it stayed on in all their NTFS glory for Linux to figure out later (Linux had no issues with this).

Speaking of Linux, I installed Debian 13 on the machine, without a DE. I set up ssh and SMB as well as ZeroTier and Jellyfin. I also disabled the internal speakers, microphone, and camera and set it so that the computer stays on lid closed but the display is turned off. The main use case for this server is to host my multimedia files (home photos and videos as well as my music library, ripped – legally – from CDs, both my own and the library's). Previously, these files resided on my main PC, and the local backup on the Chieftec home server was accessible remotely via the Raspberry Pi wake-on-lan and ZeroTier. Now I can stream the files directly from the source rather than the backup, and no faffing with WoL is needed anymore. Besides, since I didn't reformat anything, the only thing I needed to do on my main PC was to remap the drive to the network location over SMB over the virtually extended LAN (thanks to ZeroTier).

I was also able to cut out Dropbox from my life completely (I actually deleted my account). The main thing was my everything file and all the automation around it. All of that resides on this machine now. Of course, a ten-year-old laptop in a bedroom corner doesn't have the same level of reliability as an established cloud service, but given that I'm increasingly uncomfortable with all the big American corporations, I'm more than willing to take that risk when the upside is that I control everything. Nothing here is so essential that it would threaten my life if it failed.