Whats on your Home Server

liamcrane · 3 May 2015 at 12:23

Hi guys,

Would love to get an insight to what different approaches people have to setting up there home server and what you actually have running.

I have a media HTPC setup on a 64gb SSD with 4tb of WD Reds which i use as the storage media for the house with Stablebit used to combine the drives. I wanted to go down the Hyper V or ESXi route but as i needed a dedicated HTPC with a tv tuner etc i had to make that the front end and ended up having to use VM Ware Workstation to do the virtual side of things.

I have an iTunes VM i installed on windows from an old key i had laying around as i wanted to keep this well away from everything as i dont like all the rubbish that comes with itunes! Just setup my first linux server (Ubuntu) which i have just installed Sabnzbd on and it seems to work pretty good. Setup SSH on it although never used it before so learning that at the mo as well as Samba.

Also have Xpenology on another VM as i really like the software and mainly just use it for the photo station so i can upload all my photos from my iphone straight onto the server via DS Photo.

I have all my Workstation VM's stored on the 4tb WD Reds in the storage pool but i was wondering if it would be better to have them running on a serparate data drive and then have them backup to the WD Reds pool? What do you think?

Be good to hear everyone elses setups

liamcrane · 6 May 2015 at 12:35

Hellsmk2 said:
I have a few different vm's running on an old ESXi box:

2012 DC

2008 r2 RDS (Serviio & seedbox)

Solaris 11 Oracle Secure Global Desktop server (SSL VPN)

Debian OwnCloud server

Hi mate, do you access your owncloud from outside you lan? if so how easy was it to setup?

liamcrane · 6 May 2015 at 16:17

Ok sounds fairly straight forward, do you not have to edit any of the config files? Did you set this up with wamp or something similar?

liamcrane · 6 May 2015 at 16:58

thanks mate, do you have to use IIS for that?

liamcrane · 14 Jun 2015 at 17:11

How do you go about setting up your own DNS server?

liamcrane · 14 Jun 2015 at 19:04

crinkleshoes said:
What operating system are you running on your home server?

Most (if not all) server software has the functionality built into it... you just have to enable it and configure it.

That process is different depending on the OS.

I switched my main non-storage server to S2008R2 a week or two ago and all you have to do is enable the role in server manager and then configure the lookup zone (which is basically telling it which DNS servers you would like it to check records on before it stores them locally.

In Linux variants it's a bit more complicated... but if you have a Linux server OS, then you are probably already used to command line.

The Synology OS has a app you can download through package manager. Only I didn't want to configure it on there as when the disks go to sleep, they can take a while to wake up and so it'll either keep the disks active when they don't need to be on my network... or your DNS query will wait until the drives have spun up... which would be slower than using any default DNS setup.

So it's running on an SSD that doesn't sleep in my home-built server system.

Hi mate,

Thanks for the info,

Im just running Windows 8.1 as my Home Server OS. Main reason being its an HTPC running Plex as well so couldn't find a good way to virtualize this with the TV Tuner card as graphics card inside it. I have 2x 2TB WD Reds running with Stablebit for the main storage and VM Workstation for my VM's. I do have a server 2012 license and did want to use this and setup a Hyper V server and run my VM's that well but found limitations with being able to virtualize the HTPC

liamcrane · 4 Jul 2015 at 17:08

I have my itunes server running inside vmware workstation on windows 7 as its the only way i can get my phone to sync with a VM. Dont want itunes on my main machine as its just clogs things up!

Would really like to get a server 2012 r2 license as well but they are dam pricey!

liamcrane · 9 Jul 2015 at 22:11

Can you pass through devices like tv tuners and graphics cards in Hyper V? I would really like to try and virtualize my HTPC under a hyper v 2012 server but not to sure if and how it would work

liamcrane · 10 Jul 2015 at 10:02

That was me

and like blizzard says usb over IP works fab on my Pi

liamcrane · 14 Jul 2015 at 22:28

With regards to using trials etc do you have to re-download a fresh ISO or can you just use the same one? Have not downloaded a trial for a while so wasn't sure if they came with keys etc. A snapshot in hyper v could save some time to I guess for rolling back....