Learn how to turn your old computer into a server for the Decentralized Cloud and earn passive income.

With the pace of advancement of technology, we are constantly upgrading and have old computers left around gathering dust. By factory resetting and installing Ubuntu server, you can then cluster and sell the computing power of your old computers as a Decentralized Cloud Provider on a network like Akash.

Decentralized Cloud Provider

Cost: Electricity and bandwidth

Benefit: Passive income

This article will walk you through the steps to repurpose an old computer (Mac Pro 2013) into a Ubuntu Server. Certain parts of the tutorial will vary depending on the computer you are trying to turn into a Ubuntu Server.

Step 1: Factory Reset your Computer

Mac Tutorials:

Make sure you move any important information to an external hard drive before factory resetting.

Step 2: Install Ubuntu Server

This section is adapted from this tutorial for installing Ubuntu. We, however, want an Ubuntu server, not regular Ubuntu.

Start by Partitioning the Hard drive of your factory reset computer.

1. Open Disk Utility from the Utilities folder in your Applications, or search for it via Spotlight.
2. In the top-left corner, select View > Show All Devices.
3. Select the highest-level drive for your Mac hard disk, then click Partition.
4. Use the Plus button to create a new partition. Name it UBUNTU and set the format to MS-DOS (FAT32). Give it as much space as you want to use for Linux.

1. Click Apply to create the partition.
2. Repeat the steps above to create another partition. Name this partition SWAP and set the format to MS-DOS (FAT) again. Make the size match the amount of RAM in your Mac. This might be something like 4GB, 8GB, or more.
3. Click Apply to create the partition.

Next, we need a USB Flash Drive to download the Ubuntu server:

Ubuntu Server file is a few GBs make sure you have a large enough Flash Drive.

You can follow along with this video for the software section. Or follow the text below from Step 3 of this tutorial.

1. Download the latest version of Ubuntu
2. Download balenaEtcher
3. Open balenaEtcher and click Select Image.
4. Navigate to the Ubuntu disk image you downloaded and click Open.
5. Insert your USB flash drive and balenaEtcher should automatically select it. If it doesn’t, click Select Target or Change to select the flash drive yourself.
6. Make sure the correct drive is selected since the next step erases it.
7. Click Flash and enter your administrator password to erase the USB flash drive and create an Ubuntu USB installer.
8. When it’s finished, macOS prompts you to Eject the flash drive.

Configuring Ubuntu Server:

Follow along with the video tutorial.

Restart your Mac while holding Option and reinsert the USB flash drive. Then select the Flash Drive. Your Mac will then boot up as a Ubuntu server.

If you are using an external keyboard that is not the Apple External keyboard. Your Mac may not go to the bootloader when you hold the option.

Steps in video tutorial:

1. Connect your computer to the router with an ethernet cable.
2. Set Static IP on the server (be sure to check your router to see which Local IPs are available)

To log in to your router, look on the router itself to find its Local IP. Type into your browser the IP to connect. Then enter the Username and Password to log in.

Next, click around until you find the DHCP Status to find the range. Now for your static IP of the server choose a Local IP outside of the range. This way no other device might get assigned the same Local IP as your server. In this case, like in the video, 192.168.1.200 will work.

3. Follow the rest of Installing Ubuntu Server section of the video keeping everything the same.

Allow External Connection to your Ubuntu Server

Jump to this part of the video tutorial.

Dynamic DNS

Your Internet Service Provider might change your home IP address. The Dynamic DNS will make it so that the hostname you create will always track the change in IP address.

Ports

Open a port for your server to be connected to from outside the local network

Login to Router and add port forwarding to the Local IP of your machine (192.168.1.200)

Now, you can ssh into your server using:

ssh your-username@192.168.1.200 -p 123

You’re all done! You have a functional Ubuntu Server!

The next step is to connect your server to the Akash network as a provider to start earning passive income!