I have bought a new piece of equipment for my “home lab”, a HP ProDesk 400 G3 Desktop Mini. This small computer does not draw much power and it is completely silent. I have installed Ubuntu Linux and I am using it as a web server for web application development. I do have many single board computers I could have used but they all run the ARM architecture and I don’t want to mess with trying to compile software on Linux for another architecture. This system has a Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6500T CPU, only 8 GB of RAM, and a 250 GB SSD but that should be good enough for running web applications.
So far I have installed the web applications WordPress, Drupal, Elgg, and phpMyAdmin. I also used Docker to create a container for running WordPress 5.4. This was the most difficult process as even AI was not much help in getting this working. I connect to my web server using SSH, FileZilla, MySQL WorkBench, and Visual Studio Code so it gives me some more practice with the tools I use with Linux hosts.
