Member-only story
How I turned my old MacBook Pro into a Home Server to run network-wide Ad Blocker
Hello there, here I am in the New year (I can still say that right?) with a new addiction, Self Hosting. I have been following the self-hosted community in Reddit for a while now, and I always wanted to have my own server to play around with, run some programs, break some stuff and perhaps some automation to make life a little better.
At the start of this year, out of nowhere, I got a spark to try it out, after all, I am a developer and interested in these kinds of stuff.
Okay, I got the interest checked, what about the hardware? How about a Raspberry Pi?
Yes, this credit card-shaped thing is actually a computer capable of running several applications and it is one of the highly recommended hardware for DIY projects/learning/small servers.
Am very tempted to buy one of these, the latest Raspberry Pi 4 model has, a Quad-core 1.5GHz CPU and 2/4/8 GB of SDRAM. That should be a lot for starters or home servers.
I was on the verge of buying one of these, but then I remembered I got a very old Macbook Pro (early 2011) laying around somewhere doing nothing but collecting dust, interesting!💡. So can we turn this into a Home Server? and thus the quest beings…
What do I have?
Let's look at what this mac has,
Hardware
My old mac has a
- 2.0GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, which should be more than enough for my use case.
- it has already been upgraded to 16GB DDR3 RAM
- I have already replaced the default HDD with 250GB SSD as the boot volume
Also, this mac has an optical drive (yea remember it?) which has no use nowadays. So I have removed the optical drive and replaced it with a 1TB HDD (2.5 inches) with the help of an HDD Caddy (it's cheap).
For more storage, I can always make use of the External Hard drives connected via the USB.
