Building a Server

[[JiF]Tristan]

I’m planning on building a home server and i'm not sure what to do about an O/S
I was thinking Linux server but I don’t have a year to learn it! I just want to be able to save copy’s of files to it and use it for streaming to TV’s and computer’s and be able to access and manage it from my other pc’s on my LAN and out of town. any ideas would be much appreciated

[[JiF]Brick]

For the O/S, you could consider Windows Home Server http://www.microsoft.com/windows/produc ... fault.mspx
you can get it for about $100. I am not familiar with it, but it appears to have multimedia capabilities.

For away from home access I use remote desktop with no-ip.com ($10/year) http://www.no-ip.com/support/guides/rem ... sktop.html
I remote into one PC on my lan and then can get to any others on the lan by remote desktop-ing from it.

For the hardware, I would consider setting up a RAID-1 mirror. That's two hard drives that get written to simultaneously. If one fails, you can still operate until you replace the other.
You can get 1 and 2 TB (TB = 1000 GB) drives for under $100 now. You will also need a RAID controller card. That is built in on some motherboards. I recently got one dirt cheap on ebay.
Then get a 1 TB external drive for backup and you are double protected.

I have had good luck with barebone kits from Tiger Direct. You could start there, and for under $500, have an awesome server.
Example:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... tigeremail

[[JiF]Mike]

I put a Windows Home Server (WHS) into my house a few months back. I just LOVE it! Having a central place to store all my digital stuff is just great! It even backs up all my home pc's automatically, alerts me to problems with my home pc's no matter which pc I am sitting at, and it has a very cool "Drive Extender" feature. The Drive Extender simply pools all your drives together to make one huge drive. Then on selected folders it will copy the content to each drive so if one drive fails you still have copies on another drive. Unfortunately Microsoft has announced that Drive Extender is not going to be in the next version of WHS. That aside, WHS does some very cool stuff and is designed to be easy to use. You can get a trial of it from Microsofts website. If you decide you like it, you have to buy a physical disc and reinstall. Even though it gives you the option to upgrade online, you must reinstall the OS which will reset all the settings. It will however keep the data in your shared files intact. It was a pain, but I'm glad I tried it before I bought it.

You can go with linux, but WHS is just slick and easy to use. You can manage it with the "Dashboard" from any pc, or use Remote Desktop to connect. I installed LogMeIn to manage mine from anywhere. I also use SageTV for TV, movies, pictures, and music. I have 3 extenders in the house that allow any content on my server to be watched on those tv's. It's some rather cool stuff if I do say so myself. There's a specific version built just for WHS. I've been using SageTV for years now for all my digital content, and live TV. WHS really brought it all together and gave me some additional options I didn't have before.

[[JiF]Doc]

http://www.geeks.com/products.asp?cat=SVR" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; they have some good deals on prebuilt servers/pcs that will make good servers, depending on what your using it for. The Arma server that im running just has XP but I may be considering an upgrade to Windows Home Server. Looks easier to use vs learning linux.

[[JiF]Mike]

The current version of WHS is built upon Windows Server 2003 and it's designed to be easy to use. Set it up and walk away, I rarely need to do anything with it. I love linux and probably could have put together something that did most of what WHS does, but it wouldn't have been nearly as easy. The next version of WHS is being built upon Windows Server 2008. I've heard some good things about it, but there is no easy upgrade path when it comes to Drive Extender. Unless they delay it again, it should be released in August. If you decide to go with WHS it might be worth waiting, or you can find and install the Release Candidate which would expire in August...gotta be around somewhere. It's called "WHS Vail" I think.

[[JiF]Tristan]

First of all thanks for the input guys!!!
And it really helped to get input on WHS otherwise I would have ruled it out without even looking into it.

Once I finish building the server I’ll be trying out WHS and maybe Amahi it’s free and it runs on fedora/linux and looks like it has a lot of the same features as WHS but I think I would feel safer with WHS I’ll post how it went when it’s built.



Plans are
AMD Athlon II X2 2.9GHz
Micro ATX AMD Motherboard Supporting RAID
2 GB DDR2 RAM
2x 750GB SATA Hard Drives in RAID 1 Setup
And a Well Cooled Mid ATX case with a lot of extra room for more hard drives if needed

And speaking of cooling I have a NAS drive that i only had on a few weeks at a time
and after about a year and a half one of it’s drives failed I checked the temps and they were
running near 130°F that’s hotter then my processor or gpu ever get!!! and it’s part of why i’m building a server now.

[[JiF]Mike]

Just thought I would post about something that has just happened to me. My old desktop PC's hard drive died on me suddenly yesterday. I'm talking about the kinda dead where the drive is making loud clacking noises as it's being accessed on boot, and the pc doesn't do anything. The kinda dead where there is no possibility to get the data off the drive without sending it out to a specialist company. Typically a bad thing! This wasn't a huge problem for me cause the desktop has only been running again for a few weeks and I was just playing some games, and browsing the web on it. Annoying to rebuild, but nothing would be lost except time. Then I remembered Windows Home Server does backups automatically, and this PC was setup with it. So I broke out the "WHS Client Restore CD" and booted up with another hard drive I found lying around. I got lucky and it was the same size! The PC booted up, detected my hard drive and network card and asked for the WHS password. Then I had to choose which partitions and drives to restore. I recreated the hidden 100 MB system partition on the 'new' drive and mapped it's backup to it. Then I created the OS volume and mapped it's backup to it. It sounds more complicated than it was. I clicked next and went and watched TV. An hour later my PC is back up and running as though nothing happened!! I have the server backing up 3 computers, I'm quite impressed with WHS.

[[JiF]Tristan]

Ok so i'm finally building it!
any tips on the best way to configure two 2TB drives and Two 750GB drives?
and should i use anti-virus software on it?
also i decided to go with WHS 2011 & thanks mike you made the decision easy

[[JiF]Brick]

T:

Wow, took u long enuff

Get a RAID card that supports at least 4 drives (ebay)
Mirror the pairs = RAID 1

If you had 4 same size drives, you'd do RAID 5 or 10

If you don't do AV software make it a rule to never surf from it, only d/l updates, provided you have some sort of firewall between it and the net.
But I'm not that familiar with WHS and if it does a lot of net access.

Mike?

[[JiF]Mike]

I just grabbed one of these a few weeks ago: ans Digital 5-Bay eSATA RAID 0/1/10/5/JBOD Tower Storage Enclosure w/ 6G PCIe Card with three 2TB drives. For various reasons I won't get into right now, I just set the drives up as individual drives. I have over 12TB of storage on my server now. I got it on sale for $150, plus the cost of drives. So far I'm pretty happy with it.

[[JiF]Tristan]

Update!
The Server has been up and running since late September and so far I’m really happy with it
Thanks again for the help!

Athlon x2 3.0GHz
4GB RAM
2x 750GB RAID1
2x 2TB RAID1
Antec 620Watt power supply
Windows Server 2011
And pleanty of cooling