Turning an Old Gaming Laptop into a Home Lab
I work in security evaluation, which mostly means looking at systems from the outside and checking whether they do what they say. For a while now I've wanted a place where I could build things myself, break them on purpose, and not have to explain anything to anyone afterwards. So I finally started a home lab. This post covers the first weekend. It isn't really a tutorial. It's closer to a log of…
The author, a security professional, transformed an old Dell G7 7588 gaming laptop -- sitting idly in a drawer -- into a home lab. This post serves as a log of the first weekend of building the lab, detailing what went wrong and advice for future endeavors. The primary goals are to learn cloud infrastructure, offensive security, and run AI models locally.
The author decided against building separate labs for each goal, fearing a collection of half-finished labs. Instead, a single platform was chosen to host all three learning tracks. The first weekend saw the installation of a hypervisor, storage setup, and a single container alongside backups.
The Dell G7 7588, a 2018 gaming laptop, proved suitable for the lab due to its 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD, and battery functioning as a small UPS. Before installation, Memtest86+ was run for seven full passes to ensure no bad RAM. The laptop is paired with a new desktop featuring a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, RTX 5070 Ti, and DDR5-6000 memory for AI model processing.
Proxmox VE 9.2 was installed on the laptop, replacing Windows. The author chose ext4 over ZFS due to the latter's RAM cache requirements. A smaller root partition was allocated, with the remaining space given to a storage pool for guest disks. The laptop's two internal drives were allocated for different purposes: a 1 TB NVMe drive for guest disks, and a 1 TB 5400 RPM HDD for ISOs, templates, and backups.
The first guest is named svc-01, an unprivileged LXC container running Debian 13. It was selected over a VM due to its quick startup time and low RAM usage. The container is configured as unprivileged, with root inside the container mapped to a normal user on the host. The author then hardened the setup by creating a regular user, setting up an SSH key, and disabling password and root logins. A note was made that the setup was not fully hardened.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
