Posts on Small Server Lab

A 2015 MacBook Pro as a Full-Time Homelab Admin Box

Tue, 03 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My busiest homelab machine is a laptop from 2015. A mid-2015 15" MacBook Pro sits on the desk with its lid open, running Ubuntu around the clock. It’s where an AI assistant, Claude Code, does the day-to-day admin work on the rest of the lab.

I bought it new in 2015 for data science training and work. Later it went to my stepdaughter, who used it for years until she finally upgraded this year. Suddenly it was sitting unused: a quad-core i7 with 16 GB of RAM and a built-in battery, free for the taking. Rather than buy a mini PC, I put it to work.

Adding SATA Ports to an Old Desktop With a 4-Port PCIe Card

Tue, 03 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My Proxmox server, an HP Omen 870 desktop, has exactly three SATA ports, and all three were in use: one for the system SSD and two for a RAID-1 pair of hard drives. To add more drives I put in a cheap 4-port SATA card. It has worked with no drivers and no setup.

The card

What Runs in My Homelab, and Why Each Box Is There

Tue, 03 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My homelab is not a rack of enterprise gear. It’s a handful of old machines on a shelf and a desk, most of them more than ten years old, each with one clear job. Here’s the whole thing, box by box.

It started with Home Assistant. I wanted one place to watch what my home was doing, especially the solar panels and the heat pump water heater. But before connecting everything in the house to a new system, I decided to build the foundation first: solid networking, security and backups.