Turning laptop into proxmox homelab server

In 2025, almost everyone has a spare laptop collecting dust in a box.
In this article, I’ll give a quick overview of how I saved mine by turning it into a test Proxmox node.

1. Hardware

I'm listing only the components relevant to the Proxmox cluster.
There’s extra disk that could be swapped with an SSD for a software RAID 1 setup—but since this is just a test Proxmox node, that’s not necessary (at least for now 😄).

• Model: Acer Aspire V3-771
• CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3630QM @ 2.40GHz
• Memory: 4×8GB DDR3
• OS Disk: Samsung SSD 860 – 512GB
• Network: 1 Gbit/s Ethernet adapter
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M
• GPU2: Intel® HD Graphics 4000

2. OS Installation

I installed Debian 12 by following the official Proxmox installation guide:
🔗 https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_12_Bookworm

I won’t go over every step, since the process is well-documented. Instead, here are a few additional tweaks to turn the laptop into a functional homelab server.

3. Post-Install Laptop Configuration

This is an older laptop, so I removed the battery to avoid issues caused by always-on AC power. Since I don’t have a UPS, I needed a way to power it back on after an outage. Here’s how I solved it:

• Enable Wake-on-LAN (WoL) in the BIOS.
• Use a Raspberry Pi (which powers on automatically after an outage) to send a WoL packet to the laptop:

#!/bin/bash
# Check if the laptop is reachable
if ! ping -c 1 192.168.0.2 &>/dev/null; then
    # Send Wake-on-LAN packet
    wakeonlan AA:AA:AA:AA:AA:AA
    echo "WOL packet sent at $(date)" >> /var/log/ping_and_wake.log
fi

Not perfect—but it works.

Prevent sleep on lid close:

We don’t want to keep the laptop lid open all the time. To stop the system from sleeping when the lid is closed:

sed -i 's/^#HandleLidSwitch=suspend/HandleLidSwitch=ignore/g' /etc/systemd/logind.conf
systemctl restart systemd-logind

4. Proxmox Tuning

Disable the Enterprise Repo:

sed -i "s/^deb/#deb/" /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-enterprise.list

Enable the Community Repo:

echo "deb http://download.proxmox.com/debian/pve bookworm pve-no-subscription" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-community.list

Remove the “No Valid Subscription” Warning:

sed -Ezi.bak "s/(Ext.Msg.show\(\{\s+title: gettext\('No valid sub)/void({ \/\/\1/g" /usr/share/javascript/proxmox-widget-toolkit/proxmoxlib.js
systemctl restart pveproxy.service

Final Thoughts

This setup is great for testing and learning. Old laptops can be surprisingly capable when repurposed as lightweight Proxmox nodes.

P.S. I’ll probably write a follow-up article on how to use the laptop’s GPU as a video transcoder in Plex. Stay tuned!