From Dust to Utility: Transforming a Samsung NC110 into a Public-Facing Server

Transforming my old Samsung NC110 netbook into a server was a quiet defiance. You don’t think of hardware like that — an Atom CPU, 2GB of RAM, and a 250GB SSD — as being up to much these days. The machine struggles to open more than a couple of browser tabs. But it turns out that even this modest hardware can still do a lot if you ask it to do the right things.

The setup wasn’t about nostalgia. I needed a place to run backend services for some apps I was building — an Express.js server, a React Markdown blog, and my personal website. Nothing that would set the world on fire, but enough to make exposing them to the public internet a necessity (Although I recently deployed both webs with Cloudflare Pages).The problem was how to do that securely without turning my home network into an open field. That’s where Cloudflare Tunnel came in.

Cloudflare Tunnel is one of those tools that feels like cheating. It skips past the complexities of port forwarding and avoids the risks of exposing your IP address to the internet. Instead, it creates a secure tunnel between your machine and Cloudflare’s network, making your local services accessible without the usual headaches. The clever part is that this doesn’t just work — it makes the whole process feel effortless.

Setting it up was straightforward. After linking my domain to Cloudflare and updating the nameservers, I installed the cloudflared connector on the netbook. Cloudflare’s dashboard handed me a token and a simple command authenticated the tunnel. Messaging with JSON configs or editing complex files was unnecessary; it just worked. That’s the simplicity you appreciate when working with a machine that needs every bit of its meager power for running services.

The tunnel itself is surprisingly versatile. I routed different subdomains to different services on the netbook. My Nginx server became the gateway to a React app, while other endpoints handled the blog and backend. All traffic went through Cloudflare’s network, and SSL certificates were handled automatically. That part felt like magic — secure HTTPS connections with no configuration required.

I set up the tunnel as a systemd service to make the whole thing reliable. That way, it would restart automatically if the server rebooted. When everything was up and running, the experience was seamless. Requests routed through Cloudflare felt snappy, as if the netbook were sitting in some nearby data center instead of my living room.

The best part wasn’t just that it worked — it’s that it worked well. Cloudflare offloaded the heavy lifting, managing encryption and certificates, while my netbook focused on running the apps. What could have been a fragile experiment turned into something reliable enough to feel like an actual server. It was a kind of resurrection for hardware that might otherwise have been gathering dust.

Turning that old netbook into a public-facing server was about more than solving a technical problem. It was about finding a way to get real utility from a machine most people would have discarded. That’s the thing about technology: it’s not just what it can do — it’s what you ask it to do. And sometimes, you find that even the humblest machines can surprise you.

Here is a helpful video that will guide you if you want to try Cloudflare. The Cloudflare UI in the video is a little outdated, but finding what you need is easy. And, if something doesn't work well, ask your favorite AI friend what to do next. 😉