path: root/drafts/home server evolution

In my junior year in high school I set up my first home web server. I made it out of a used fleet desktop that my school was getting rid of. It was a Dell Optiplex GX400 with a Pentium 4 and (I think) 768MB of memory. It had Windows XP Professional and Microsoft IIS and Thunderbird mail on it. When I set it up it was the first time I had ever port-forwarded from a home router to a device on the network and configured a firewall to let traffic into my bedroom. Because I didn't know anything about networking, hosting, or web servers, I published web pages to it by emailing them to that Thunderbird instance. A scheduled task would unzip the attached files and copy them to the web root. 

My friends and I all had our own address so we could paste funny memes and jokes on our own "walls" while we were in class. The site had no domain name or certificate. Just an inscure, dynamic Verizon IP address which I had to re-share every time my parents got a new upstream IP. We called it the "Troll Nexus Center".

Fast-forward a few years and I'm in college and I have my own place. I got really used to being able to remote into the Computer Science lab, run long-running or intensive jobs, disconnect, and then re-connect later.