I've began to develop an interest for homelabbing around December 2025 to April 2026. At the time of writing this, it is now May 2026
- HP Pavilion 2022
- HP Pavilion 2023
- Macbook pro 2021 M1 (main computer)
- HP Stream
- Lenovo Thinkcentre 720s + HP F1523h
I first got the HP Pavilion around 2022. This laptop was one of the first laptops I used to delve in my creative passions such as Blender, After effects, Photoshop, etc. It served a very important purpose in my capabilities today.
Though one day, I booted it and it was stuck on the loading screen. At the time I wasn't all that tech savvy when it came to hardware but the causes was relating to the bios. I could not wipe windows due to me not being able to find my recovery key. And so, the laptop was abandoned.
Id also like to note that the screen cracked due to hinge problems.
Within a month, I purchased another pavilion. This laptop stuck with me from 2023-2025. While it was a good laptop, it again suffered from touchpad issues, and the hinge failed, cracking the screen in half. Thankfully it was under warrenty at the time so I was able to get it fixed. However, the back panel was not screwed on properly, and I found windows to be quite slow.
I also was quite tired of HP hardware failures. I wanted a change.
I bought my Macbook refurbished from Back Market and it works as good as new! Even after a year of usage. My main concerns for buying a laptop was the specs. I needed it to be able to handle blender and the MB Pro does just that. This Mac will also be used to manage my server through SSH.
The HP Stream belonged to my brother. It's not a great laptop in terms of specs but somehow he was able to run roblox and code game scrips. I gave my brother my second HP Pavilion. He fixed the touchpad and Epoxie'd the screen.
I bought this thinkcentre off of facebook marketplace on June 3rd. I figured a mini-small pc would be best suited for my needs as the stream had older hardware and was quite flakey. Along with the thinkcentre, i got a small monitor (HP f1523h) to install Debian on the pc. I also wanted to try our kDE plasma as a gui! The monitor dates 20 years back and i love the retro look that it has.
May 15th, 2026 - May 17th, 2026
To familiarize myself with the installation proccess of a new OS (I've never used Linux) I installed UTM on my Mac to run a virtual machine of Ubuntu server. Here, I learned the importances of virtulization, and how fun it can be.
Initially, I was going to install ubuntu server on my first HP Pavilion, intending to wipe the old window's software. I found this path to be unsuccessful and the installation kept crashing. I did more research and found out that it may've been a hard drive issue as it was not listed in the bios. Since then, I've been able to recover my old miscrosoft account the belonged to the laptop. However, the information present was outdated. After changing it, I was then prompted to wait a month to be able to access my recovery key. (if there even is one)
I begrudgingly turned towards the HP Stream. I also took a liking to Debian's community. They detailed its simplicity and "it just works" basis.
So, i flashed debian on my usb drive.
In reluctance to changing geers to the HP Stream, I tried installing Debian on the Pavilion. Again, the installation did not work. It was at this point that I found out about the hard drive issue and finally booted Debian on the HP Stream.
The proccess was easy, though I had to go through the installation a few times as the HP Stream bios is a bit different from the Pavilion's. (I had to disable Legacy)
Before I knew it, the server was up and running. While this documentation may have seemed like a streamlined problem-solution proccess, it was quite difficult and I started to get burnt out trying to understand why such a simple proccess caused so many problems.
I learned that you can also assign an ip address in the server directly rather than trying to login to the router. However, doing it this way may causes issues long term as the IP you'd choose isn't reserved which futher allows for other devices to try and mount on it.
While doing it through the server may seem straightfoward, As a begginer I want to ensure that theres minimal future problems so I will go with the router method.
Once logging on to my router's page, I navigated to the devices connected to the internet, and reserved my server's ip. from there I was able to log in to my server through ssh. SUCCESS!
Now that i'm connected to my server through SSH, i needed to disable the sleep functions so my server doesn't power of when the lid is closed on my HP Stream.
May 19th, 2026 - May 20th, 2026
After doing some research I found that Opnsense and pFsense were my best options for my current begginer state. I also learned that i'd need dedicated hardware to act as my firewall (which I current do not have at the moment due to microsft)
Therefore I will be installing a firewall at a later date when I have a seperate device and money :,).
In the future I would also like to setup VLAN. At my current posistion in homelabbing I don't think it's particulary neccesary as there isn't really any smart devices connected to my network besides phones, tablets, and a regular tv. Though in the future, I would like to dedicate a network to my own personal devices
May 20th, 2026
I chose Open Media Vault as my NAS software due to its simplicity and how light weight it is.
Installing OMV on my server was quite simple, as well as logging in. However things started to get weird after logging into OMV.
I couldn't log into my SSH server. I panicked and thought I was going crazy! None of my passwords were working. I hate to admit that I looked the problem with AI and it ended up making things so much worse to the point where I had to reinstall debian all together. Note to self: Look at Reddit forums before turning to AI.
I'm not really sure what OMV does, but it overwrote the SSH configuration files, basically locking me out of my server. I soon figured out how to fix this problem and documented it in the NAS.md file.
Thank you reddit.
June 6th, 2026
Fast fowarding to june 6th since buying a SFF pc for my new main server. Installing Debian was a breeze, and this time I wanted to give KDE Plasma a try. I knew that Debian holds your hand a little less than Ubuntu, but I didn't realize that I'd have to find a driver for my wifi stick. It was tough being that my stick was unbranded and not widely recognized by debian. Luckily I came across a repo that provided me with the correct driver. Though, it was that easy. While installing the driver, one of the proccesses failed. luckily, the issue was reported by another user to which they were helped and the problem was fixed for them (and me). I now could connect to the internet via wifi on my pc.
Due to Open Media vault giving me problems in the past, In terms of NAS, the direction i decided to go in instead was simple-plainold samba.