One of my most prominent and biggest projects has got to be my homelab server. I have spend many hundreds of hours tinkering and improving it over the course of a couple years that I now use it everyday, whether for network storage, a shadowsocks VPN, a game server, or just as a website.
At the start I had only a single HP PROLIANT N36L Gen 7 MicroServer (Third-party review) which was very much a low grade NAS for people who want to run many different services without needing to worry about speed and network speeds.
!image assets/img/projects/server_setup/hp_proliant_preview.png
With only 2 cpu cores and 2 GB of memory it was only good for very simple tasks which was fine enough when I was just starting out with homelabbing
But then my laptop that I was using for school broke because the hinge gave out (because it was a crappy HP laptop hinge) and was breaking the screen, making it so that it was only usable as a server. So I plugged in an ethernet adapter and a 1TB USB SSD and hooked it up to my "cluster"
!image assets/img/projects/server_setup/laptop_setup.jpg
I wanted to try and install a new operating system on it, and since I was in my distrohopping phase I wanted to try installing Arch Linux on it, since I figure that would allow it to be actually usable rather than in it's chromeOS state
The main issue was that the current operating system had a lock on it that made it so that you as a student wouldn't be able to boot into a different operating system, either through installing a new OS on the current drive or through using a LiveCD.
So what I had to do was go INTO the currently installed operating system, toggle a setting, and then use a tool that would install ChromeFlex, which basically acted as an intermediary operating system so that I could unlock the actual firmware, letting me plug in a better drive
Now that I could put in my own drive and not have the device yell at me for not having a ChromeOS operating system I went ahead and installed Arch Linux on the drive and booted it up