Building My First Home Server Setup and What I Learned Along the Way

By Admin · 11 Sep 2026 · Coding

Over the weekend I finally got around to setting up an old laptop as a small home server. Nothing fancy, just enough to host a few personal projects and experiment with things I do not want running on my main machine. The trickiest part was actually getting the networking right, figuring out port forwarding and making sure everything stayed reasonably secure. I ended up learning a lot about firewalls and SSH configuration in the process, some of which actually overlaps nicely with what I have been doing for my DevOps coursework. Funny how side projects always end up teaching you things your actual assignments do too.