Some time last year I wrote about using a cheap Lenovo Thinkcentre I bought as a lab machine to run my homelab server. Initially I used it to try out a new (to me) Linux distro, which I installed straight onto the machine. I enjoyed test driving it, but it never replaced my primary system.
So, this week I decided to repurpose the ThinkCentre as a general lab server to locally host open-source applications and dust off some of my brain’s cobwebs around server configs and networking.
This YouTube video from TechHut provides a really easy way to get set up if you’re interested in doing something similar.
For now I’m running Ubuntu Server LTS with Docker and Portainer for container management.
On top of this, I installed Cosmos as a dashboard which looks nice and has a really decent OOTB feature set. So far, I dig it.
Future plans include trying out some new apps (this sure beats more software subscriptions) and adding a NAS to the lab, so if you have any recommendations send me an email reply using the button below.
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