I'm working on putting together a home server of sorts. Unfortunately, my hardware is 400km away, and I don't have access to any of it until mid next week. Until then, I'm wanting to try to finish up planning out all the software that I need to run on the server (at first at least). I plan for this mainly to hold all my media, and probably just access my music/videos over the network for now. I'm also planning on using it as a private web server for development and whatnot.
I'm fairly familiar with Linux (no expert, but I've used it enough to be somewhat familiar with it), so I'd prefer to use this. People always suggest BSD for servers, but I haven't really gotten a reason out of anybody besides it's stability. If anybody can give me some real convincing reasons to use it, I'll consider it. That being said, I need to decide on a distribution to go with. I was thinking of a Debian-based distro (well, either Ubuntu or Debian itself really), as that's what I've had the most familiarity with, and it seems to be quite well developed. I've also considered Arch, as it's known to be quite stable, and the whole rolling-release thing is pretty cool as well. Any suggestions as to which distro's would be well suited are warmly welcomed.
One thing I left out is that I'll be using a 320gb drive I had laying around as of now for this thing. I can't afford any new drives right now, and am waiting for the new Samsung F4's as well. I'm hoping for 2TB of storage eventually. That being said, I'm wanting to address the issue of backing up my 2 computers; this isn't a big deal now, but I am still looking for a solution. I'll have my desktop, and my laptop, both running Linux (if that makes any difference). What's an easy way for me to back-up both rigs to my server?
Lastly, what's involved in hosting virtual machines on the server? Are all of the resources allocated from the server's hardware, and the rig accessing the VM doesn't use any of it's own resources? I'd assume this is how it works, but I'm not too sure. I've found a cool script called phpVirtualBox, which is essentially a web-interface for VB. It's still in development, but it's looking pretty damn good so far.
Anyways, that's pretty much all I need to know to get this thing up and running. I'm open to any suggestions. Sorry for the long winded post, I just wanted to get everything out of the way. If I left out any info lemme know.
Thanks,
- Jesse
I'm fairly familiar with Linux (no expert, but I've used it enough to be somewhat familiar with it), so I'd prefer to use this. People always suggest BSD for servers, but I haven't really gotten a reason out of anybody besides it's stability. If anybody can give me some real convincing reasons to use it, I'll consider it. That being said, I need to decide on a distribution to go with. I was thinking of a Debian-based distro (well, either Ubuntu or Debian itself really), as that's what I've had the most familiarity with, and it seems to be quite well developed. I've also considered Arch, as it's known to be quite stable, and the whole rolling-release thing is pretty cool as well. Any suggestions as to which distro's would be well suited are warmly welcomed.
One thing I left out is that I'll be using a 320gb drive I had laying around as of now for this thing. I can't afford any new drives right now, and am waiting for the new Samsung F4's as well. I'm hoping for 2TB of storage eventually. That being said, I'm wanting to address the issue of backing up my 2 computers; this isn't a big deal now, but I am still looking for a solution. I'll have my desktop, and my laptop, both running Linux (if that makes any difference). What's an easy way for me to back-up both rigs to my server?
Lastly, what's involved in hosting virtual machines on the server? Are all of the resources allocated from the server's hardware, and the rig accessing the VM doesn't use any of it's own resources? I'd assume this is how it works, but I'm not too sure. I've found a cool script called phpVirtualBox, which is essentially a web-interface for VB. It's still in development, but it's looking pretty damn good so far.
Anyways, that's pretty much all I need to know to get this thing up and running. I'm open to any suggestions. Sorry for the long winded post, I just wanted to get everything out of the way. If I left out any info lemme know.
Thanks,
- Jesse
