You should host a home server

I turned an old Dell Vostro 260 into a Debian home server

June 16, 2025

A while ago I was wanting to make some sort of home server, but determined purchasing the parts to be out of my budget. I spent hours looking at pricing and setups with Raspberry Pis, other micro PCs, but I gave up because I thought it wouldn’t be worth it.

However, a while later, I was reminded of the old family computer, and after some searching, dug it up from in my storage.

It was a Dell Vostro 260 running an insider build of Windows 10. It had a blazing-fast Core i3 2120, 8GB DDR3, and a GT 210. It ran insanely slow, but had history on it from early projects of mine.

I was going to make this my home server, but first, I would need to backup the disk. Luckily, the disk is only 220GB.

My first approach was to use test and test to directly write the disk. After a long time of waiting, I found it was nearly impossible to access this image, as I zstd compressed it and there’s no way to view it without decompressing the whole thing.

I then settled on just using test and test. It was slightly slower, but I was able to access the whole thing.

Once that was finished I encrypted it with gpg and uploaded it to my school’s Google Drive (I probably shouldn’t do that)

My distro of choice for the server was Debian, since it’s pretty simple to setup and it’s stable.

For some cursed reason I had to copy the ISO to the USB drive via an Arch ISO on the destination server that it was booted off of. This took a few attempts.

Finally, I installed Debian, setup SSH, and I now had an always accessible home server, and could finally take down my $10/mo Hetzner server.

My applications of choice to install initially were:

  • A few coding projects that would benefit from being always online
  • Weblate (to move test)
  • Caddy (A great webserver)
  • Jellyfin
  • Zipline (Screenshot/File upload handler)
  • Samba

It’s quite fun to manage this system as a hobby project, and equally as nice to do so for free rather than pay a subscription for a VPS. If you’re considering purchasing hardware for a home server, check if you have any old computers lying around, or find cheap ones from an online marketplace. It’s more economical, and better for waste.