Turning an Old Gaming Laptop into a Home Lab

Description and use

A Dell G7 laptop became a reliable home lab: Proxmox VE installed, partitions and storage pools configured, an LXC container with hardened SSH created, and quick snapshot recovery demonstrated.

Problem

Need a low‑cost, reliable platform to experiment with cloud infra, offensive security, and local AI models without over‑provisioning.

Outcome

A single laptop serves as a resilient, low‑power home lab with separate storage, container isolation, and verified snapshot recovery, enabling safe experimentation across three learning tracks.

Workflow

• 1. Ran Memtest86+ for 7 passes on laptop RAM
• 2. Installed Proxmox VE 9.2, chose ext4, set root to 128 GB
• 3. Fixed Proxmox repos to pve‑no‑subscription
• 4. Created systemd config to ignore lid switch
• 5. Configured two storage pools: NVMe for guest disks, HDD for ISOs/backups
• 6. Created unprivileged LXC container svc‑01 with Debian 13
• 7. Hardened SSH: added key, disabled password/root logins, added user to sudo
• 8. Took snapshot clean‑base
• 9. Broke SSH by uninstalling OpenSSH and deleting /etc/ssh
• 10. Verified lockout
• 11. Restored snapshot
• 12. Reconnected via SSH without host key warning

Evidence

I went with Proxmox VE 9.2, installed straight onto the laptop. Windows is gone.

Source

I set the root size to 128 GB so the rest goes to the pool where guest disks live.

Source

I created a regular user, set up an SSH key just for the lab, and turned off password logins and root logins.

Source

I took a snapshot called clean‑base. I made sure to take it after fixing sudo, because a snapshot saves things exactly as they are.

Source