When I joined the Incommunities team in Bradford, they lacked a development environment for their live website. One of my initial tasks was to resolve this by sourcing a PC and installing Debian Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, PHPMyAdmin, Xdebug, and GIT source control. I integrated this setup into their internal network and scheduled regular backups to an internal shared filesystem.
This server became my primary development tool throughout my contract and was subsequently adopted by the resident development team.