Hey guys! Like many of you here, I’m fed up with further encroaching enshittification and I’m tired of paying for subscriptions, so I decided to turn a 10-year old laptop I got for university into a home server. I’ve been tinkering with it for around a week now and I’ve spent many evenings and hours on figuring stuff out, but I’m at a point where I’m mostly set up and content with what I have. I thought I’d write down some of my experiences :)

• The laptop in question is an Acer Aspire E5 with a 1TB HDD, 8GB of RAM, I think an Intel Core i5 CPU and an on-board graphics card - very low-key stuff but sufficient for my setup. In order to make the server a little faster and snapper, I’ve removed the CD drive and instead added a 9,5mm caddy to connect the HDD via the caddy and a 2,5" 250GB SATA SSD as the main drive for a total of 1,25TB storage.
• The extra drive cost me 25€, the caddy another 7€
• I’m running Ubuntu Server LTS as my server OS and it’s been working pretty flawlessly so far. I’ve had a few minor hiccups here and there (for example, my laptop won’t just outright boot and always says that the boot drive isn’t mounted correctly or something, so I always have to manually select the drive to boot the PC from; or sometimes when I boot the PC, it’ll boot into emergency mode for some reason - a couple reboots and it goes away) but all in all it’s fine
• I was mainly looking for a way to get rid of Netflix and maybe Spotify, so naturally, I gravitated towards setting up an Arr stack to get access to all the media I’d want.
• However, in order to not have to work with the terminal at all times, I installed Casa OS to have an intuitive UI to manage all the little self-host programs I could be interested in.
• To install all of this, I followed a guide on YouTube to get started in the first place as well as another guide to set up the Arr stack. It took me a whole while to get a grasp of things, and I’ve spent a lot of hours to figure out how I want the host and container volumes to be set up, but I got it now (mostly)
• Current programs I’m using: Prowlarr, Sabnzbd, Radarr, Sonarr, Lidarr to get access to the media I want to watch and listen to as well as Jellyfin and Navidrome for playback. I’m also getting my feet wet with Portainer because I want to host a Teamspeak server for my friends.
• Programs I want to set up in the future: a Minecraft server possibly, a network-wide adblocker, and Tailscale to access my media outside my home network.
• Little bonus tangent: before I started working on the server, we’ve been having problems with our internet - think constant outages where regular restarting of the router was required only for another outage five minutes later. A technician came by and fixed it, but I was told to get a new router because a newer router would be able to fix some of the common issues you get internet access on its own. That’s what you see further to the back by the wall (50€ used, Fritz!Box 7510). Unfortunately, it only comes with one (1!!!) singular LAN port, so I had to buy a switch for 5 LAN ports in total (another 12€) which is sufficient for all the devices we use at home.
• If you’ve been keeping count, all this cost me ~100€ including a few subscriptions to get access to some of the content I’m downloading. Definitely a worthwhile investment considering Netflix costs us like 18€ a month or so? We’ll get that cost back easily.

That’s pretty much all I think of sharing right now! Thanks for reading and let me know if you have any tips for a newcomer :)