Best OS for Home network

jonneymendoza

jonneymendoza

jonneymendoza

Caporegime
Joined
7 Apr 2008
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Lorville - Hurston
Hi guys im planning to move over my old single core pentium 4 3ghz components inside a new case that houses multiple hdd's and running it as a server 24/7 with the following apps/purposes:

SAB nzb server
Tomcat server
File sharing server
Music streaming
Backup functionality.

I was wondering what's the best and easiest OS that can do all of the above. I don't mind a linux distro, in fact im leaning towards a linux OS as i want to learn it but wondering if maybe there is a linux OS that offers both ease of use setting up and also ability to tweak stuff even further.

I also want to access some of the above apps/services remotely via website link and even putty for any low level access.

cheers in advance
 
Ubuntu Server would be perfect, it has easily installable packages for all of the services you are after combined with great documentation and probably the biggest/busiest forums for any other distribution :) Basically it's very stable and a good choice for your first Linux server.

Debian would be my next suggestion if you wanted slightly more work (read learning) without the added bloat of Ubuntu.

An idea of software you would want:

SAB NZB+ runs natively, simple to install.
Tomcat - Just install Apache web sever.
File sharing - Samba, again easy to install and plently of info on how to configure it.
Music Streaming - Ive always just used network samba shares for this. There are numerous bits of software around though depending on your needs.
Backup - You could either use your samba file sharing setup with a tool on the clients (i.e backup to network share), or look into rsync.
 
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quality thanks. Does apache web server have a servlett engine? i always thought i had to use tomcat instead of the normal apache web server.

Also, does Ubuntu server have a UI? or is it all command line access via ssh/putty?
 
Sorry, I always thought Tomcat was just a Windows version of Apache :p But yes Tomcat is in the Ubuntu repos so you can just install that and use if for servlets.

Ubuntu Server doesn't have a UI by default, but there's no reason you couldn't install one if you wanted (but it doesn't really make sense to have one running on a server). Installing packages and editing their configs is the bulk of what you will need to do which is fairly straightforward at the command line or over SSH.
 
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If you want a WM, there is little harm in installing something like openbox, it'll have no discernible effect on system resources, and if you're really fussy you could just stick to starting it automatically.

Personally, I just have Gnome installed on my server, even though the machine is headless it makes things a little prettier and more usable with x forwarding, which is still rarely used.

I have an ML110 (G3 I think) - P4 3Ghz with 1GB of ram. It runs Ubuntu and is more than up to the task of a web server (Apache, PHP, MySQL) hosting all my development, my own and a few other sites, file server (AFP+Samba) with 2x1TB drives in LVM, Usenet stuff (Sickbeard and SABNzb+) as well as routing all of my internet traffic.

It barely breaks a sweat with that, either;

Code: 
mike@storm:~$ uptime
 11:44:19 up 179 days,  2:00,  1 user,  load average: 0.09, 0.10, 0.04
mike@storm:~$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1002        951         50          0        203        111
-/+ buffers/cache:        635        366
Swap:         1952        210       1742
mike@storm:~$

Java being the bundle of joy that it is, I'd probably expect more load with Tomcat, but you have less OS overheads with Linux than you would with Windows.
 
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Install Ubuntu server, then install Webmin and enable SSH for Putty.
Job done :)
Oh and dont get Tomcat from the repo's, they have made some changes to it that has a habit of breaking servlet standards. Its not difficult to get up and running :)
 
sweet! thanks. another question. does the OS need to be run on a hdd that is formated using EXE2? what about any seperate hdd's? i have a bunch of ntfs hdd's i want to simply add to my ubunto server without reformating? is it possible? can ubunto server read/write and detect these ntfs hdd's?
 
Most distros have gone ext4 by now, I suspect. But you can essentially use any filesystem you want.

NTFS read/write is supported with ntfs-3g, although performance isn't great.
 
Sorry, but Yum has nothing on Aptitude.

You'd have thought, after using apt/Aptitude for around 9-10 years that I'd have seen way more problems than using Yum a handful of times, but no such luck.

RPMs have always been a PITA, IMO.
 
MikeHiow said:
Sorry, but Yum has nothing on Aptitude.

You'd have thought, after using apt/Aptitude for around 9-10 years that I'd have seen way more problems than using Yum a handful of times, but no such luck.

RPMs have always been a PITA, IMO.
Click to expand...

And to give the opposite perspective for balance :) I've been spending the last few months using Yum pretty heavily, (part of a project to put in some centralised repository servers at work which has involved a lot of testing), and we've had no major issues with Yum or RPM's in general at all. The only minor issue we had was in the differences in the metadata requirements between SLES and RHEL. Whereas I have had a lot of issues with apt based patching in the past.

To the OP; you can use Ubuntu server at home and it'll work quite nicely. Other alternatives are CentOS or OpenSUSE (I've been using the latter (or it's previous incarnation) for the last dozen+ years without major issues).
 
Tbh, there's nout wrong with Windows7.
Its not as lightweight as Ubuntu server, of that im not even going to contest.
But considering the power of even the most basic of servers/desktops nowadays, for home use, resource utilisation doesn't really become an issue imo.

My home server is a simple dual core system with 2Gb of RAM and 3x2Tb Disks in RAID5.
It performs as a file server, streams music to devices, auto-encodes to 1080p on the fly to my PS3 and runs IIS to host some externally facing web services for myself.
Does the lot perfectly well.
 
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