Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: SilverZ06 on November 26, 2012, 09:47:13 AM
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So I am getting tired of trying to find pictures/music/videos/ etc on any one of the 5 computers in my home so I am thinking of learning about home servers and putting one to use. Backing up everything is also a big plus for me. I know absolutely nothing about home servers so I am coming here to try and get some advice/directions from those of you that have home servers. Where do I even begin to find out the ins and outs of building and maintaining my own server? :uhoh
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I built a Linux based file server. Using Samba, you can setup Windows network drives/folders under Linux. I also use that same server as a media server. I run Mediatomb for that. If you have a DLNA capable television or Xbox/PS3 then you can use them to play files off the server as well (pictures, video, audio...).
I use that same server as a firewall/router for my home network. Properly configured it is much better than anything in a consumer grade router or anything on your personal computer.
Caveats? You need to learn how to use the specific Linux distro you want to use. I use Slackware. For me it is very simple to use. For others it could be a nightmare.
Nice thing about Linux is how little hardware it takes to run it and how stable it is.
Good luck on whatever path you chose.
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I want to learn linux and have tried to install ubuntu on my laptop but I am completely lost when it comes to doing anything on linux. I usually just get frustrated and reboot into windows :lol I guess I need to find a book on linux and read up. As far as the actual hardware goes, can I run multiple HDDs in RAID to make carbon copies of each other? I guess what I am asking is can i run 2 in raid and an addition in raid as well? so 4 total hdds but basically two HDDs with two carbon copy HDDs?
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for your raid questions, are you planning to use a server class mobo with onboard sata raid hardware controllers or a home pc/gaming mobo? hardware raid is more robust than what is essentially software raid found on most home pc/gaming mobos. personally, a fairly economical and robust raid solution can be found with a drobo.
http://www.drobo.com/products/professionals/drobo/index.php
and i know it works with most versions of linux.
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gyrene is right. Software RAID is worthless. When you want to get serious about needing a real RAID solution, a hardware based RAID solution is the only way to go.
I do not bother running RAID on my server. I just have it automatically back itself up every night as the data on my server changes in clumps and then stays static for a long time.
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I do not bother running RAID on my server. I just have it automatically back itself up every night as the data on my server changes in clumps and then stays static for a long time.
You're doing an incremental save on a different drive, or maybe just a copy?
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You're doing an incremental save on a different drive, or maybe just a copy?
No copy. The server has 6TB of data on it. 99% of that data is all static. I made a copy of that and unplugged the hard drive. The rest is done incrementally.
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So I am getting tired of trying to find pictures/music/videos/ etc on any one of the 5 computers in my home so I am thinking of learning about home servers and putting one to use. Backing up everything is also a big plus for me. I know absolutely nothing about home servers so I am coming here to try and get some advice/directions from those of you that have home servers. Where do I even begin to find out the ins and outs of building and maintaining my own server? :uhoh
I do it the EASY way. I went to Frys and bought a router with USB ports and filesharing capability. There are several vendors offering these at low cost. Usually they are running some flavor of LINUX, but they can be administered through a web interface that minimizes your need to understand the innards. You DON'T have to use the router functions at all.... I just plugged in the LAN side, configured it with my web browser, plugged in a set of USB hard disk drives, and they instantly became available to all of my Windows and Linux machines through the well-known "SAMBA" protocol. I use this system extensively, and have had good success. Right now, I have a total of 8.25 Terabytes shared.
I published a detailed article on how I did this awhile back. Here's a link:
http://askmisterwizard.com/EZINE/AdvancedNetworkingSection/NAS/TheEasyWay/NasTheEasyWayPage01Full.htm
:salute
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easiest way - buy a Netgear NAS. out of the box it does all the filesharing/streaming/backup stuff and theres plugins to do a load of other things like CCTV recording etc.
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a bit pricey for something decent isn't it RTHolmes, especially if you want redundancy?
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the empty 4-bay units are about £100 iirc
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Meh, you should just use floppy disks like I do. :P
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...As far as the actual hardware goes, can I run multiple HDDs in RAID to make carbon copies of each other? I guess what I am asking is can i run 2 in raid and an addition in raid as well? so 4 total hdds but basically two HDDs with two carbon copy HDDs?
Skuzzy is right on the money about software RAID: it is worthless. And the only thing a proper hardware-based mirrored RAID-1 setup protects you from is the physical failure of a hard disk drive. (It does *usually* also give you a slight read-access performance increase, but that depends on how well the RAID firmware is written.) You can protect yourself just as easily on JBOD disks by running a periodic backup to another disk drive.
The way to get both better overall disk performance as well as some measure of data redundancy is to have a hardware-based RAID-10 array of four (or six, or eight...) disk drives. But that is almost certainly not cost effective for a desktop machine, for example:
1 x Adaptec 6805E controller ........... $250
4 x WD 500GB VelociRaptor drives ... $600
At those prices, it makes sense to look at other options, like maybe a large super-fast PCI-E SSD unit with a 7200-RPM SATA disk drive as the backup.
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Skuzzy is right on the money about software RAID: it is worthless. And the only thing a proper hardware-based mirrored RAID-1 setup protects you from is the physical failure of a hard disk drive. (It does *usually* also give you a slight read-access performance increase, but that depends on how well the RAID firmware is written.) You can protect yourself just as easily on JBOD disks by running a periodic backup to another disk drive.
The way to get both better overall disk performance as well as some measure of data redundancy is to have a hardware-based RAID-10 array of four (or six, or eight...) disk drives. But that is almost certainly not cost effective for a desktop machine, for example:
1 x Adaptec 6805E controller ........... $250
4 x WD 500GB VelociRaptor drives ... $600
At those prices, it makes sense to look at other options, like maybe a large super-fast PCI-E SSD unit with a 7200-RPM SATA disk drive as the backup.
You can get a fairly large Revodrive for 800 bucks and that's a lot faster than regular drives in raid 0/10. Or a z-drive.
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I used to run FreeBSD, then Solaris x86 (utilizing disksuite) for years... then migrated to FreeNAS for a couple years, and then last year, finally for simplicity and necessity of windows only apps, I laid down a version of Windows 7 Pro (software mirroring capable). I've used software mirroring for years with great success. It may not be the most efficient, but when I'm maxxing out read/writes off consumer grade drives at 96MB/sec, I'm not seeing an impact.
- I have a small drive I run my OS off of
- I have a pair of 2TB drives running Raid1 for images/apps/financial/important stuff
- I have a pair of 1TB drives running Raid0 for media storing/sharing to my HTPC for items I don't care about losing.
About 550GB of the data on RAID1 is backed up to the cloud via crashplan for $3/month.
This solution has worked like a champ for me. :salute
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OK, I need to revisit this idea. Here is what I want. I want a machine to do frequent backups of all my computers in the house and also be a central storage area for all of our media (to be accessed by any computer). I would like the backups and media carbon copied on (at least) two different HDDs in case one fails. I am thinking WHS2011 will do all of this for me? I'm thinkin 3 1tb seagate drives with an i3 processor and 8gig ram should be plenty sufficient? any other recommendations?
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OK, I need to revisit this idea. Here is what I want. I want a machine to do frequent backups of all my computers in the house and also be a central storage area for all of our media (to be accessed by any computer). I would like the backups and media carbon copied on (at least) two different HDDs in case one fails. I am thinking WHS2011 will do all of this for me? I'm thinkin 3 1tb seagate drives with an i3 processor and 8gig ram should be plenty sufficient? any other recommendations?
For a backup server you can use some recycled machine. You'd waste your money investing to that hardware!
Just set up a linux fileserver on raid 10 and use a backup script to handle backups. The most cost-effective solution (and what I would do) is to get a dedicated NAS device, with that you can have your network storage for around 400 euros.
What were you thinking to use for backups? You cannot backup anything to the same machine unless it's a eSata harddrive or something separate from the computer.