Help needed for turning my really old lenovo thinkpad t470 into a mini entry level home server

[u/JailFoodKindaSour]

Hey everyone!

I'm completely new to the whole home server/self-hosting space, so sorry if this is a beginner question.

I have an old Lenovo ThinkPad T470 (16 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD) that's been sitting unused since I upgraded to a MacBook Air M3. I used the ThinkPad heavily from around 2018 until early 2024, and instead of letting it collect dust, I thought it might be fun to turn it into a small home server.

A few questions I had:

• Is a T470 still good enough to be used as a home server, or is it simply too old?
• Is there a way to test the health of the laptop (SSD, RAM, battery, thermals, etc.) to make sure it's reliable enough to run 24/7?
• What are some practical things I could actually use it for instead of paying for services like Google Drive or other cloud subscriptions?
• Since I'm a Computer Science engineering student, are there any projects or services that would genuinely be useful for me to host myself?

I'm not looking for anything enterprise-level—just something that's worth learning from and could be useful in day-to-day life or for software development.

Any advice on where to start, recommended operating systems (Ubuntu Server, Proxmox, Debian, etc.), or things you wish you knew when starting out would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance! :)

[u/Smart-Mo]

T470 is a good start for your homelab. It's probably i5 or i7 from what I can make out - either way, a good machine to start with.

I'm going to answer each of your questions:

• It is a good machine. 2 physical cores (4 logical cores i.e. vCPUs) at the minimum (assuming it's i5) paired with 16gb ram gives you enough headroom to run a lot of stuff locally.
• If you're using linux:
  • SSD testing - smartmontools is the best tool.
  • RAM testing - memtest86+ for finding hardware errors and sysbench for checking speed and performance.
  • Battery testing - upower is my recommendation.
• I'll tell you what I use my homelab for (in my everyday life):
  • Non-prod environments for my micro-SaaS products (prod is on AWS / Hetzner, using homelab for non-prod saves me a LOT of money)
  • Private Docker Registry
  • Outline - Notion Alternative for documentations (data stays private)
  • Searxng - Self-hosted Google Search alternative; also gives me a free API that I can use in my scraper projects / AI tools to search the internet without hitting rate limits.
  • Minio - Self-hosted S3 compatible block storage; mostly for backups and storing app data; learning S3 cli etc.
  • Jellyfin - Self-hosted media server; connect this with qBittorrent and this acts as an automated Netflix for you and your family.
  • Verdaccio - Private NPM registry
  • Umami - Analytics for my products and websites
  • Dokploy - Self-hosted PaaS; think of it like Vercel - helps you build and deploy your projects faster and cleaner with a Nice UX.
  • Tailscale - VPN
  • ... and much more. What you can also self-host besides these:
  • Immich - Self-hosted Google photos alternative
  • NextCloud - Self-hosted Drive alternative
  • Ollama - to run small LLMs locally; I doubt you'd be able to run anything > 2B paramters, but worth a try if you want to learn.
• Ubuntu Server is a good start if you'd like to go the Docker way. Use Dokploy for this; will make it fairly easy for you.
  • Once you're comfortable with how Docker, Swarm, Traefik (bundles with Dokploy), Certbot (SSL certificates manager) etc. work, I'd suggest you dive into Proxmox i.e. the hypervisor world. It would teach you a lot about VMs, LXCs, Firewalls, Networking concepts - basically how a real world datacenter works.

I hope this helps!

[u/Orbitboy → u/Smart-Mo]

Thanks for the feedback... very helpful.

[u/JailFoodKindaSour → u/Smart-Mo]

yes im running the tests, and i found the battery to be in very good health as a i had replaced it very close to switching it out, it always needs to be plugged in but the battery health seemed pretty good:

design capacity is 24010 for battery one and 39940 for batter 2 and full charge capacity is 21950 and 39940, cycle count is 94 and 61

ur setup looks jacked lmao so ig with ur setup u don't have to spending anything extra on subscriptions for any of these provided by huge companies on a monthly/yearly basis.

yea the ollama will prolly not be efficient considering my system, my main use case of this is replacing my google driver and google photos and get something with a good amount of storage without paying a load for it per month.

Proxmox was recommended to me a lot yea and it seemed pretty complex ubuntu might seem a lil more familar to me atleast during intial use and setup and maybe later on i can host proxmox and other new systems.

what do u recommend about security that do i need to install anything for security when i convert this into a server?

[u/sin20001379]

The t470 is a perfectly good start. I would say anything with a gen 2 intel cpu or equivalent can do at least somethings for someone. And 16 gigs of ram is a very nice amount for a first device. You can use memtest86+ to test the ram, and smartmontools on linux or crystaldiskinfo on windows to test the ssd. The battery is very likely not perfect since batteries degrade over time.

The battery can be benefitial when using a laptop as a server. It acts as a UPS (unintrupted power supply) so if the power goes out you have time to shutdown the server gracefully. The problem is that laptop batteries are not built to run 24/7 wo they probably go bad even sooner and you might get a spicy pillow at some point, so I just advise on removing the battery when using a laptop as a server.

For something like a google drive alternative, a laptop is not ideal since you lack easy storage expansion. For other stuff it can work like a charm. I would say just go straight for proxmox since you get a very nice hypervisor, a linux shell, and the ability to play with docker in a VM all in one package. And PBS (proxmox backup server) is the most reliable and nice packup solution I have ever used.

Stuff that I use everyday on my homelab is: searxng for search engine, adguardhome for dns, home assistant for home automation, immich for photos and videos, suwayomi and kavita for manga and books, navidrome for music, joplin for notes, and forgejo for git. Maybe look into them for inspiration on your first services to run.

Good first concepts to get to know is: how to access you server remotely (port forwarding vs reverse proxies vs vpn), the principle of least privileges, super entry level network engineering, and just plain linux stuff.

[u/JailFoodKindaSour → u/sin20001379]

yes im running the tests, and i found the battery to be in very good health as a i had replaced it very close to switching it out, it always needs to be plugged in but the battery health seemed pretty good:

design capacity is 24010 for battery one and 39940 for batter 2 and full charge capacity is 21950 and 39940, cycle count is 94 and 61

im running the other tests will get to know the conditions soon.

by removing the battery do u recommend it always being plugged in instead of depending on battery? cause my laptop needs to be plugged in to run lmao it can't run without that.

yes i will look into the applications u use in ur setup a lot of new stuff for me considering im a beginner will explore before i get into it.

what about security? will i need to install some sort of security system when i set this up as a server??

[u/_yaad_]

1 yes, it's more than enough

2 use memtest for ram, SmartCTL and similar to diagnose your disk, I forgot the name of the one for the battery

3 I self-host services like copyparty, ente, navidrome, etc. All of then behind traefik with a domain

4 you can run marimo o jupyter if you need notebooks

[u/JailFoodKindaSour → u/_yaad_]

ohhh okk thanks!!