The 'free' server build

Earlier this year, I received an old PC for free from my teammate Kristjan Lepik. After confirming a few details, I understood that I could probably find an use case for it, especially given my unhealthy obsession with trying to make old hardware useful. Free tech tip: if a free PC has blue USB 3 ports visible, then it’s not completely obsolete yet! For most of its time, it sat idle. The components and case got shuffled around based on other project ideas and a desire to have a small gaming PC, but then it ended up back in its original configuration. One day, my trusty ThinkPad T430 that ran as a home server started encountering oddities around the network interface cutting out during periods of moderate to high load, and its “Power on with AC attach” feature was also flaking out on me, meaning that a prolonged power outage would result in a home server that doesn’t come back up again. That’s when I decided to make this free PC my home server. The machine initially came with these…