Simple one: What Varient of *nix is easiest and best for a home server?

I got Bebian installed last night :)

I tried the netinst option but had the same graphics problem, so read the help fully and bypassed part of the automated installer via the help menu, which let me specify the graphics mode myself.

It's kind of like installing Windows 3.11 from Dos :) (I haven't done much with command lines in 10+ years).
 
Oxy said:
This.

But I use Arch as a headless server :D
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Ditto, risky at times but I like having the latest packages and it's only my home server... saying that I haven't run into any major problems yet, more issues with the buggy programs I'm running on it to be honest!

I would also recommend Debian, but Scientific Linux seems to be one people are also shouting about at the moment. Seems to be a new incarnation of CentOS/RedHat.
 
I personally like CentOS after trying a number of flavours over the years starting from Slackaware 3. My uses are purely as servers.

There are a couple of reasons I like CentOS and they are the fact it is built for stability and reliability based on RHEL and I just find the RHEL environment a bit more intuitive for me compared to Debian flavours. I like being able to do a 'service network restart' after setting up my ifcfg-eth0 file correctly for example and find it easier to remember the file structure under for various config files. I have a friend who looks after Debian servers and he loves that way of doing everything... horses for courses.

What I get with the various CentOS builds I have done, in my experience, is a rock solid environment for a server that is easy to update and pretty easy to source packages I require for it. My current build I am working on is with CentOS 6 minimal, Java, PostgreSQL, Postgis, Gisgraphy, Mysql, Tomcat, mysql master/Master replication. Everything is available via yum (with a couple of repository additions) except Java with has an installable bin file. All pretty simple after a bit of working out and configuration. All nice and stable. Other flavours could most probably result in the same but this is the one I enjoy using most.

RB
 
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gisgraphy said:
Hi

can you give me the centos source package url where gisgraphy is packaged. i am interested
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Sorry, my mistake, the package is downloaded and extracted as a zip file from the Gisgraphy website. There is no package as it runs from wherever you place it (after a couple of tweeks). I tend to download and place in /srv/www and then unzip. Just need to change a couple of java config files in the resulting extracted file set and run (note this is with v2.1.1). The real pain was getting Postgis (with the geo4 and proj) built and running. Having that all in a yum package has saved me a lot of time and effort.

RB
 
Personally i would say give slackware a try. Probably one of the most stable Linux distros and possibly one with the biggest learning curve. But you will be 10x happier. Personal choice tho lol. i have used centOS 6 as a server at work and it ran pretty good for what we needed it for
 
interesting views. There are many different ways you can use a home server but the complexity is getting the right setup for the specific requirement.


I can see the point in a headless install: no need for monitor,kb,mouse locally connected, no gpu usage on desktop. slightly lighter distro. But if we break it down a bit more headless actually can mean less convenient, harder to admin if things go ****.

Also consider you would use IGP / APU on said server and as such all the time it will be in low / long idle and add very little to the memory usage or power consumption especially if on a blank screen saver, monitor power down (but then again im looking at it from a modern APU perspective)

If you also consider the component choice when building the server you would go for a nice 18w - 20w idle system and 8gb/16gb ram which could if needed step upto a 65w TDP for example, in this scenario extra resources of a desktop install vs headless server mean less in 2012, after all you can remove any junk you dont want or just plump for a lightweight distribution with core applications run extremely light and headless may actually limit your possibilities
When you build headless and webadmin to shares that's all fine and dandy but i would expect for most a nice GUI driven approach to installing and managing streamed content and folders would be preferable for most people.

either way i think the biggest headache for me at the moment is choosing in linux which RAID / Redundancy software to go with and the best method of differential remote backup.

any ideas?
 
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phill1978 said:
interesting views. There are many different ways you can use a home server but the complexity is getting the right setup for the specific requirement.

I can see the point in a headless install: no need for monitor,kb,mouse locally connected, no gpu usage on desktop. slightly lighter distro. But if we break it down a bit more headless actually can mean less convenient, harder to admin if things go ****.
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It can also be easier to admin, specifically so because you can generally do things a lot more specific and faster with a CLI than with a GUI. It depends of course, on what exactly you are using, but personally I wouldn't know how to administer a server without a cli. It's also common to use remote, or webbased GUIs, neither of which need to be displayed locally on the server, thus the requirment for x.org on a server is minimal, it really depends what you're trying to do.

phill1978 said:
Also consider you would use IGP / APU on said server and as such all the time it will be in low / long idle and add very little to the memory usage or power consumption especially if on a blank screen saver, monitor power down (but then again im looking at it from a modern APU perspective)

If you also consider the component choice when building the server you would go for a nice 18w - 20w idle system and 8gb/16gb ram which could if needed step upto a 65w TDP for example, in this scenario extra resources of a desktop install vs headless server mean less in 2012, after all you can remove any junk you dont want or just plump for a lightweight distribution with core applications run extremely light and headless may actually limit your possibilities
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One thing you do need to look out for is the age of kernel vs age of hardware. If you're running a server, you should probably pick a stable OS. I'd expect it to all work, but if you're picking up relativly new desktop hardware for the use in a server, you may not get what you're looking for with regards to a desktop experience. Example, I use debian stable for my work OS. I needed to pull in some backports for sound and graphics support, this is really easy when you know how but is a command driven process, and may be beyond someone who needs to install a GUI to a server. For the most part, if it were me, I'd stick with debian stable headless and use google to solve my cli problems, but as stated, you feel free to do it anyway you can figure how to get it work. :)

phill1978 said:
When you build headless and webadmin to shares that's all fine and dandy but i would expect for most a nice GUI driven approach to installing and managing streamed content and folders would be preferable for most people.
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No me, but the wonderful thing about this is you can have your own preference. :)

phill1978 said:
either way i think the biggest headache for me at the moment is choosing in linux which RAID / Redundancy software to go with and the best method of differential remote backup.

any ideas?
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Most people will use standard software raid because it's a) good enough and b) easy to repair and replace. Looking at it from a redundancy point of view, if you buy a raid controller, your disks will be useless if your controller blows (unless you have a replacemant that works the same). Software raid should be pretty reliable wherever you put it.

Even then, raid isn't backups and catastrophic failures do happen. Remember that.
 
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aln said:
Most people will use standard software raid because it's a) good enough and b) easy to repair and replace. Looking at it from a redundancy point of view, if you buy a raid controller, your disks will be useless if your controller blows (unless you have a replacemant that works the same). Software raid should be pretty reliable wherever you put it.

Even then, raid isn't backups and catastrophic failures do happen. Remember that.
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thanks for your reply

My options are:

fedora-freenas8 with zfs raid-z2
fedora-openmediavault (freenas 7 fork) with raid-6
unRaid with raid 6 as I do like the idea of not having to wait for a rebuild to finish to get the data on the failed drive

and for backup well how can someone realistically 'backup' a 7-9TB array easily without having a duplicate server with one as storage and one as backup ? without spending a fortune of course
 
phill1978 said:
thanks for your reply

My options are:

fedora-freenas8 with zfs raid-z2
fedora-openmediavault (freenas 7 fork) with raid-6
unRaid with raid 6 as I do like the idea of not having to wait for a rebuild to finish to get the data on the failed drive
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I'm no expert, but I'd go with something relativly common as you're most likely to get support if you screw it up. I'd describe what you're hosting, what functionlity you'd like, then pick the best. ZFS is awesome, but I'm not sure what fedora-freenas8 is refering to?

phill1978 said:
and for backup well how can someone realistically 'backup' a 7-9TB array easily without having a duplicate server with one as storage and one as backup ? without spending a fortune of course
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A tape drive?

Thats a lot of storage, can it be deduped? I'd ask what you're hosting, but suggest you don't need to backup your entire pr0n collection, so the question is, do you need to backup all 9TB?
 
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phill1978 said:
thanks for your reply

My options are:

fedora-freenas8 with zfs raid-z2
fedora-openmediavault (freenas 7 fork) with raid-6
unRaid with raid 6 as I do like the idea of not having to wait for a rebuild to finish to get the data on the failed drive

and for backup well how can someone realistically 'backup' a 7-9TB array easily without having a duplicate server with one as storage and one as backup ? without spending a fortune of course
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Not really sure just where you are going with this one Phil??

You don't want to run headless... but in reality picks 1 & 2 are designed, mainly,to be administered via web GUI. Once installed you open up your fav browser and log in and away ya go.

If your trully going FreeNAS 8 and ZFS your going to have to chuck a serious CPU AT IT AND MEGA BUCKETS OF RAM to get any sort of decent transfer speeds. Most of the "yeah it's great" comments are flyng in from people that have run it in VB or some virtulaised setup in small lab setups and no real hardware hammering behind it at all. Just watch the Youtube , and such like, demos... it's all VB and full of c^^p. Bottomline .... is that FreeNAS 8 is aimed squarely at enterprise level use and hardware

OpenMediaVault.... well the poor mans FreeNAS 7 really... still struggling to get up and take it's fist wobbly steps. Yup... full of features but unless you have a really good grounding in using something like FreeNAS or FreeBSD your going to struggle to get most of it to behave.!! After using FreeNas 7 until swapping to OpenMediaVault... frankly I'm giving it another week and then I'm going to whack 7 back on :)

If you have the hardware to support a full 7 - 9TB's of data in a RAID 5, 6 or 10 , ZFS or it's incarnations.... you already have the time, money and inclination to think ahead and have that redundant server in place already
 
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Essexraptor said:
Not really sure just where you are going with this one Phil??

You don't want to run headless... but in reality picks 1 & 2 are designed, mainly,to be administered via web GUI. Once installed you open up your fav browser and log in and away ya go.

If your trully going FreeNAS 8 and ZFS your going to have to chuck a serious CPU AT IT AND MEGA BUCKETS OF RAM to get any sort of decent transfer speeds. Most of the "yeah it's great" comments are flyng in from people that have run it in VB or some virtulaised setup in small lab setups and no real hardware hammering behind it at all. Just watch the Youtube , and such like, demos... it's all VB and full of c^^p. Bottomline .... is that FreeNAS 8 is aimed squarely at enterprise level use and hardware

OpenMediaVault.... well the poor mans FreeNAS 7 really... still struggling to get up and take it's fist wobbly steps. Yup... full of features but unless you have a really good grounding in using something like FreeNAS or FreeBSD your going to struggle to get most of it to behave.!! After using FreeNas 7 until swapping to OpenMediaVault... frankly I'm giving it another week and then I'm going to whack 7 back on :)

If you have the hardware to support a full 7 - 9TB's of data in a RAID 5, 6 or 10 , ZFS or it's incarnations.... you already have the time, money and inclination to think ahead and have that redundant server in place already
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thanks for the reply :)

I didn't say headless wasnt an option, just questioned the need for it on a very basic setup.

im interested in your freenas 7 experience vs whatever new storage o/s you choose.

btw freenas 8 will use 16gb of ram if you have it, but it wont if you don't, its fairly adaptive.

im trying out amahi at the moment oh and its just HD movies and FLAC Ive never seen the point in storing P0Rn i don't really look at the stuff.
 
I did the Google research thing with Amahi a few weeks ago and although it looked interesting... I honestly thought it was a bit of a fudge muffin having to go through installing Fedora... then .... then. I'd lose the will to live by te time I finished faffing about with all that lol

After getting heaps of advise from another forum member I went with a 32 bit install of FreeNAS 7 with 3GB RAM on a HP Micro. Installed to a 8GB bootable USB stick. Took minutes to install configured a static IP and choose a added in Intel NIC as default device. Job done! That's the only bit you shoud need a monitor for ... after that ... connect via web GUI. Shares to Win/Linux/Mac no problem and fast data access and streaming to multiple devices on a very low spec device. Pulled it to go all WHS 2011... regret it a little but it's a solid OS.. can't get my Mint 12 to see it at the moment which is a real pain in the ass.

Remedy make my own little server to play with Mint instead. That's where the OpenMediaVault plopped in. Trouble from the start. Initial install very like FreeNAS but after setting the thing up yadda yadda yadda.. Closed down rebooted and........ nothing. No connection. Hands up... I probably borked a setting somewhere but it's so frustarting. I'll have to start from scratch and reinstall more than likely. Give it a whirl and then ... revert.

I did try FreeNAS 8.... but it just ground to a halt or crawled along if asked to do more than a few things at the same time. Hence my comment about throwing serious hardware at it. Without it you'll end up with stuttering during media streaming. In comparison the 7 version just ...... flew :)
 
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Essexraptor said:
I did the Google research thing with Amahi a few weeks ago and although it looked interesting... I honestly thought it was a bit of a fudge muffin having to go through installing Fedora... then .... then. I'd lose the will to live by te time I finished faffing about with all that lol

After getting heaps of advise from another forum member I went with a 32 bit install of FreeNAS 7 with 3GB RAM on a HP Micro. Installed to a 8GB bootable USB stick. Took minutes to install configured a static IP and choose a added in Intel NIC as default device. Job done! That's the only bit you shoud need a monitor for ... after that ... connect via web GUI. Shares to Win/Linux/Mac no problem and fast data access and streaming to multiple devices on a very low spec device. Pulled it to go all WHS 2011... regret it a little but it's a solid OS.. can't get my Mint 12 to see it at the moment which is a real pain in the ass.

Remedy make my own little server to play with Mint instead. That's where the OpenMediaVault plopped in. Trouble from the start. Initial install very like FreeNAS but after setting the thing up yadda yadda yadda.. Closed down rebooted and........ nothing. No connection. Hands up... I probably borked a setting somewhere but it's so frustarting. I'll have to start from scratch and reinstall more than likely. Give it a whirl and then ... revert.

I did try FreeNAS 8.... but it just ground to a halt or crawled along if asked to do more than a few things at the same time. Hence my comment about throwing serious hardware at it. Without it you'll end up with stuttering during media streaming. In comparison the 7 version just ...... flew :)
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thanks for the advise :)


I know 7 is a lot faster id expect 8 to become a bit more adaptive as new releases come out tbh.

just to clarify what storage o/s are you using now then? I did consider WHS2011 but im really hoping steam will come to linux and then the entire home setup may end up being same linux distros which should make it easier to talk to each other.

Still im just trying out a few options, but it has to be free or very cheap tbh i want the money on the hardware
 
just to clarify what storage o/s are you using now then? I did consider WHS2011 but im really hoping steam will come to linux and then the entire home setup may end up being same linux distros which should make it easier to talk to each other.
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I've now got a mixed bag.

HP Micro is now running WHS 2011 ... I've invested cash in it (OS and various add ins)... so it's staying ...poop :( ........... Previously ran FreeNAS 7 and 8

Run a single bay Syn

And lastly a knocked together server from cheap bits off MM and my ever expanding spares collection. This is the one that I now try out various linux based server distros on. Including the ones mentioned already.

When I say knocked together ... I really mean ancient (by todays standards) gear. Single core CPU, 3GB of DDR, selection of IDE HDD's (up to 6) various PCI IDE expansion cards, NIC's etc.

:)
 
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