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Broken 2011 MacBook Pro turned into a home server
The author rebuilt a corrupted 2011 MacBook Pro as a home server running photo management, finance tracking, Home Assistant and a reverse proxy. Claude helped by reading photos of the damaged screen.
The full story
The author's 2011 MacBook Pro had a dead graphics chip (the well-known "RadeonGate" fault), so the screen showed only rainbow distortion and normal start-up froze. Wanting more control over family photos and data, they tried to give it a second life. Verbose boot mode got far enough to show text, and Claude helped by reading photos of the garbled screen, working out what was on it and what to do next.
The machine now runs as a first home server, hosting photo management, finance tracking, Home Assistant and a reverse proxy. The post walks through the recovery and set-up from the point of view of someone doing this for the first time.
Single author's account.
How it was done
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From the maker's own write-up or code. We summarise what they report; we haven't tested it ourselves.
- DEV: I turned my old broken 2011 MacBook Pro into my first home server
The full story, from the dead screen and verbose boot to the services the server now runs.