Cheap home servers are great. Last updated: May 21, 2026 You take an old Dell , Lenovo, ThinkCentre, NUC, laptop, Raspberry Pi or whatever was cheap enough not to hurt the wallet, throw Linux on it, add Docker, maybe some file sharing, maybe a media server, maybe a few scripts, and suddenly it becomes “production”. Production in quotes, of course. Because at home, production usually means: if it dies, someone complains; if the disk fills, something stops working; if SSH gets exposed by mistake, the internet starts knocking; if updates are forgotten for six months, the box becomes a tiny museum of old packages. So this is my practical Linux home server security checklist . Not enterprise paranoia. Not “install 47 tools and build a SOC in the kitchen”. Just sensible hardening for a cheap homelab machine that is always on and probably doing more than it should. The goal is simple: make the server boring. Boring is good. Boring means patched, firewalled, backed...