Making a Home Server

Making my own rudimentary Linux server at home

18 March 2026

Recently, I’ve been delving into Linux as a hobby - it’s fun to customize your system (I’ve also found Arch Linux to be fun, but I don’t trust myself enough for it), and I’ve even switched to Fedora on my home computer.

About a week ago, I dug out my Dad’s old PC out of the closet and installed Ubuntu Server on it.

It came pre-installed with SSH capabilities, which to me was mind-blowing already: being able to remotely control a server was something I didn’t think I could do without a bunch of fancy tools.

I installed Plex Media Server onto it (which let me host my DVD rips in my home to where anyone could watch them) - if you’re looking to get away from a major streaming service and have a computer and your favorite DVDs, I highly recommend it!

Next, I used a service called Tailscale to let me access my local-hosted server from anywhere (over what they call a “tailnet”), which was super awesome.

Lastly, and probably the most interesting: I found an Ubuntu package called Motion that lets me preview my camera feed, and it even saves videos when it detects motion.

Being able to SSH in remotely while I’m at university has been fun and I learned a lot about how Linux and computers in general work along the way.

My custom MOTD header for the server

At the time, I was also fixated on restoring my family’s old MacBooks from 2005 and 2007 respectively (one not working sadly). Seeing as I already had a perfectly working server set up with a free SATA slot, I managed to restore all of our data off of the drives!

And for the curious nerds like me, this is what the internals of a 2005 Macbook looks like.

The hard drive is on the bottom right! Look at how small it is!

Maybe I’ll do a blog post in the future about all the old Apple products I have, but that’s all for today. See you next time…