A home server, what should it be able to do?

JonJ678

JonJ678

JonJ678

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I'm sure many people on here have a "home server" of one sort of another, whether its a prebuilt network-attached-storage box or a full blown Ubuntu install. As I'm about to set one up for myself, I'd like some ideas on how to justify its existence.


Software:
File server, in general NAS fashion
Print server, so my one printer works from several machines
Torrent client
Squid cache, possibly with antivirus scanning
Centralised backups
Webserver (sldsmkd)
DHCP server (stulid, sort of)

Hardware:
Low wattage motherboard (probably alix 2d13 at <10W)
2.5" hard drive(s)
No fans (bubba points out that noise isn't an issue if you can put it in the loft)

Which at present doesn't seem terribly worthwhile. So I'm hoping you kind folks can add to either list. If you have a box at home which does such things, great! If not, let your imagination run wild and perhaps this thread will end with you buying one yourself.

Cheers

edit: I'm adding a photo of the board I'm looking at, to make this post look less boring:

23vmjp2.jpg
 
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There's a few reasons beyond the OP, but none are particularly sane. For example, I wish to experiment with waterproofing a computer, and it's better I kill a £120 system than a more expensive one. I'd rather learn on real hardware than on virtualbox, as it would be far too tempting to save multiple copies of the disk and revert to a previous one when something breaks, rather than working out why it broke.

Personal eccentricities aside, the topic may still be an interesting one though. At least one chap I know runs rtorrent on a simple nas, which is a good idea that I probably wouldn't have thought of. There should be at least a few unusual / clever uses for home servers on these boards that others could benefit from.
 
I have an old pentium-m laptop with maybe a gig of memory that I use as a webserver as my ISP gives me a static IP address. All my media is on the main desktop tho, as that needs to be transcoded on the fly to stream to the PS3.

Edit: It's running CentOS, i'll probably retire it tho as I have a Linux VM at Vidahost now.
 
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Why does it need to be quiet? A server shouldnt need to be quiet, once setup and you have some sort of remove admin just chuck it up into your roof space with some power and a network cable, you wont hear a thing and will save you some money. I have a server running with an e3300 celeron with 6tb of storage and 2gb of ram, it does everthing I need including transcoding of 1080p video losslessly to my ps3. You will want gigabit lan.
 
A home server, what should it be able to do?

distribute porn around every room of the house.
 
Good point regarding noise Bubba. Webserver is an interesting idea too. "Distribute porn" I'm going to change to 'dhcp server' in the spec though. On which note, it's taken me about six hours to get a dhcp server and basic firewall running.
 
Anything that WHS can do.
I use mine for backups, resilience (5x1tb 'pooled' drives), remote access to files, serves media around my home.

Its also now used to host an SQL database for my business.
 
I was going to build a home server around win7 ultimate (the OH is a student so got it mega cheap) However it now seems a waste of a good OS so is it worth buying WHS and upgrading my xp machine to win7 ultimate.

The server will be used to store my work docs and accounts. Maybe add media to it at some point.

I have win7 set up in mirror now and backup weekly onto external

Cheers
Matt
 
We have one at home, it's a Core2Duo machine, 4GB RAM, 512GB HDD (we also have a few TB in a NAS) and it's our e-mail server, backup machine, was a NAS before we got the stand alone NAS, DHCP server, and web testing server (before uploading onto a dedicated web hosting service)
 
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