building a home server
Turbo Mini Forums

I want to build one of my PCs in to a home server to live under the stairs, so it needs to have:

Remote access (I dont want a monitor etc under the stairs!)
data protection (raid array is it called?)

The idea is to be able to put all my music, videos, pictures. I have tens of thousands of files and its getting to the stage I cant remember what PC they are on!!!

So, what software do I need?!

Thanks!

AlexF

do you want to use an existing pc alex? because you could purchase a nas server if not?

If something is worth doing, it's worth doing half of.

I would buy an OEM copy of windows home server for about £100, does all you want and more.

Remote access to all the shares and computers if they are turned on and also loads of add ons available.

yeah I would like to

I've got a p4 3.2HT thats not worth binning but not in use!

AlexF

I've got ours running on a old HP with a 2.8GHz P4, put 2GB of ram in and it seems happy.

It can be set to backup all your machines aswell which can come in useful.

If its just storage you are wanting, I would agree with the NAS option. . . They can hold all of your files and you can access them from anywhere, and they also don't take up huge amount of space.
You can fit most of them with RAID arrays ( 0 or 1) for data security.
Something like this might be the ticket:
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/149259

http://www.jolyonway.com

If you really want to use one of your existing pc's get yourself a copy of a server operating system. home server is good for starters. also you dont have to spend a fortune on raid controllers. you can setup a RAID 1 mirror using disk manager in windows. you just need 2 drives so that you can create a mirror.

If something is worth doing, it's worth doing half of.

I've got a copy of windows 2003 server (standard) with an unued licence somewhere if you want it.

Hi,
I'm running a Compaq server. It's old and running server 2k3.
Speed of the server isn't too critical ( mines dual PIII 1Ghz) but a full Gigabit network is essential for moving music and video around.
Raid 0 or 1 is best, raid 5 a good alternative. I've got O/S and vital stuff on raid 0 and mp3 /pictures on raid 5.
Cheers,
Gavin :)

VEMs Authorised Installer / Re-seller. K head kits now available!

WB/EGT gauges. Click here for customers write-up

Visit www.doyouneedabrain.co.uk

My Mini build diary

Raid 0 = no raid at all!

Raid 1 is a mirror (copy of everything on each disk)

Raid 5 need at least 3 disks and you can loose one disk without loosing your data as data is replicated accros all 3 disks.

Use hardware raid. windows raid is fine until you need to recover to another server.

Hi,
Raid 0 has plenty of raid it's just stripey raid instead of shiney raid

Cheers,
Gavin :)

VEMs Authorised Installer / Re-seller. K head kits now available!

WB/EGT gauges. Click here for customers write-up

Visit www.doyouneedabrain.co.uk

My Mini build diary

Raid 0 isn't technically raid as the R stands for redundant and striping just spreads your data acrross the disks with out giving any redundancy. If you loose a disk your data is gone.

Covered this hundereds of times when I did my MCSE

Hi,
missed the bit about no fault tolerance.
Cheers,
Gavin :)

VEMs Authorised Installer / Re-seller. K head kits now available!

WB/EGT gauges. Click here for customers write-up

Visit www.doyouneedabrain.co.uk

My Mini build diary

hmm this gets complicated quick!

AlexF

It's easy.

no building engines is easy - just do the bolts up LOL

PCs require more patience then a saint.

AlexF

A mirror RAID on any standard PC (obviously you need two hard disks and a RAID controller card, or motherboard with RAID built in) and just plug it into your ethernet network and map it as something like "S" (ie, server) and tell all your programmes that the files are on s:******

Cheap and nasty compared to proper server software, but it works for me.

Schrödinger's cat - so which one am I ???

well I dont want to spend a fortune and I have a PC lieing around - well litterally its sitting behind my pc and gets used every 6 months.

AlexF