Servers at Home

[fintang]

I used to have a server for testing things but ended up mainly as a PVR ( Mythtv) until my yongest 2 year old broken one of our freinds sony playstation3 .

rather than forking out a new one for them they were happy to take the pvr

 

 

Still getting casts offs broken pcs and now in a process of doing a new one, I only have get a new hard drive (willl look at freecycle) and I am done.

 

Anyone got any cool ideas/project that I could do?

[Chris_Jones]

Got a Dual Core Atom box with 4x750GB Drives in Raid 5, running Windows Home Server

[AngryTechnician]

I have a Windows Home Server install running on an old Shuttle mini-ITX box. Home Server is basically SBS Server 2003 with some baked-in extras, chief of which is a very nice full-system backup for all your client machines. A lot of the standard Windows Server stuff is turned off by default, but there's nothing stopping you from turning it on, such as how I have set up the IAS RADIUS system to implement WPA2-Enterprise on my home wireless. The only thing MS don't support is enabling Active Directory, but I've heard of people getting it working. Also nothing stopping you from installing VMWare or the like to run some virtuals off of it.

 

The server itself is very low power due to the form factor; it was designed as a desktop, not a server, but it does the job admirably. The PSU is 180W max (normally draws much less); the CPU has all the power management set to max power savings, and the drives are Western Digital Caviar Green drives which are designed to be quiet and low-power. I have my printer hooked up to it to use as a print server, even bunged an old TV card in there to use as a PVR.

[fiendishlyclever]

I had a Dell Poweredge serverwith RAID running Ubuntu as a LAMP server (thanks dyn-dns) and torrentflux. It acted as a SAMBA server for my network and streamed video to the xbox 360. It also had email etc.

 

With the sky high price of electricity I make do with a Buffalo Livebox which has torrent, NAS, samba in a tiny embedded device. I also have a Linksys NSLU2 which I love and can't bear to retire. I leave this running apache and openssh (handy for checking out those blocked pages or accessing home machines from work). I've moved email and backup to the cloud - no hardware cluttering the house and I feel safer having a backup off-site.

 

If electricity was still pennies per unit I'd probably have a row of servers running in the loft (instead of a dusty unloved Dell server)

[sparkeh]

None anymore. I realised that when I left work I wanted to leave all that at work and live in a cave.

 

Although I am getting a bit itchy to set a win 2008 server up for fun

[jamesfed]

I dont know if this counts but I custom built a Windows Home Server with 2x1TB WD HDDs, 1Gb/s and AMD CPU.

Its looking after 1 XP notebook, 2 Win7 notebooks, a media centre, a gaming and a desktop (all 7).