[Techtalk] Home server - Where to start?

Meryll Larkin mll at alwanza.com
Thu May 12 10:14:54 UTC 2011


Weird.  I read Svenja's email and then all of your responses (which I found
interesting and useful) but I'm confused as to how we got from step 1 to
step 8.

A home server for multimedia 
    Does that mean you want it to be a home entertainment center (TV,
movies)?  - you'll need HD video card(s), input cards for cabling if you use
cable, output for speakers, maybe a projector
    Does that mean you'll be storing large files - will you need to back
them up or would losing them be okay because you could redownload them?
Will you need a backup plan or a storage expansion plan?
     Do you want to be able to import/export files easily from this machine
to others?  Maybe samba, maybe nfs maybe automount?

How you configure a server is dictated by what jobs you want the server to
do.
An EEEbox would not be my first choice for a multimedia server because I've
never seen one with more than 2G of RAM (test if you can get Hulu to run on
it), and because multimedia files tend to be large and the EEEboxes don't
have lots of HD space - but an attached external USB hd could fix that.  But
if I was new to making servers and wanted to experiment, I wouldn't worry
about wrecking a box that I got for free.

There are file servers, mail servers, web servers, compute servers, database
servers....
Servers can do just one dedicated function or they can do many.
Knowing what the hardware specs are and what OS (the default one, or Easy
Peasy, or ??) is installed on it would also help.

So Svenja, do you have an idea of how you would like this server to work for
you?  

Then our answers will be more tailored to what you are actually trying to
accomplish.


Meryll Larkin




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