551
Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy
(www.howtogeek.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
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Big shout out to Windows 11 and their TPM bullshit.
Was thinking that my wee "Raspberry PI home server" was starting to feel the load a bit too much, and wanted a bit of an upgrade. Local business was throwing out some cute little mini PCs since they couldn't run Win11. Slap in a spare 16 GB memory module and a much better SSD that I had lying about, and it runs Arch (btw) like an absolute beast. Runs Forgejo, Postgres, DHCP, torrent and file server, active mobile phone backup etc. while sipping 4W of power. Perfect; much better fit than an old desktop keeping the house warm.
Have to think that if you've been given a work desktop machine with a ten-year old laptop CPU and 4GB of RAM to run Win10 on, then you're probably not the most valued person at the company. Ran Ubuntu / GNOME just fine when I checked it at its original specs, tho. Shocking, the amount of e-waste that Microsoft is creating.
Question, what's the benefit of running a separate DHCP server?
I run openwrt, and the built in server seems fine? Why add complexity?
I'm sure there's a good reason I'm just curious.
The router provided with our internet contract doesn't allow you to run your own firmware, so we don't have anything so flexible as what OpenWRT would provide.
Short answer; in order to Pi-hole all of the advertising servers that we'd be connecting to otherwise. Our mobile phones don't normally allow us to choose a DNS server, but they will use the network-provided one, so it sorts things out for the whole house in one go.
Long, UK answer: because our internet is being messed with by the government at the moment, and I'd prefer to be confident that the DNS look-ups we receive haven't been altered. That doesn't fix everything - it's a VPN job - but little steps.
The DHCP server provided with the router is so very slow in comparison to running our own locally, as well. Websites we use often are cached, but connecting to something new takes several seconds. Nothing as infuriating as slow internet.
Buy another router that allows you to run openwrt or anything else you fancy, and use the locked-down one just as a gateway to the new one, problem solved. My setup is somewhat similar -- locked-down cable modem router that I can't customize, bought a netgear router, installed freshtomato on it