My current Home server (explained)

So I finally bought a 2 terabyte (TB) western digital hard drive for my home server. I have about 7 TB’s over 6 hard drives. I’ve already explained what makes a home server and my frustrations over home server software. But never really gone into my setup.

I have 7 hard drives of varies sizes from 200gig to 1.5tb. Most of them are Western digital drives but I do have others such as Maxtor and Samsung hard drives. I tend to buy the slowest drives because realistically I’m only storing stuff on them and accessing them over samba (smb) or universal plug and play (upnp) on my lovely XBMC setup. So speed isn’t a major thing, in actually fact the faster the drive spins the hotter it gets and heat is a enemy when you got 6 drives all spinning together.

The weird thing is I’ve never had a hard drive fail on me yet.

I’m using a combination of old 133m/s udma/eide and the new 150m/s sata. I have 2 ide drives attached to the onboard Ide ports, 2 on board sata ports and a PCI to SATA adapter with 2 extra SATA ports and a ide port. The motherboard is a elitegroup 761-gx with a old 2.8ghz mobile Amd athlon which I got from the states quite a while ago (maybe 4 years ago). I’ve thought about changing it but I really don’t need the power for a home server. In actual fact 2.8ghz is well over power for what its doing.

I think one of the reasons why nothing has failed on me is because I use spinrite 6 every few months to check if the drives are running ok or in need of some TLC. I also don’t use any Raid solutions or even Lvm solutions, I was tempted to try Lvm but gave up on it a long time ago. If Raid supported odd size drives I might have considered it a long time ago but its not practical when you have so many different drives across different local buses.

I had considered getting drobo but there quite costly even the simplest version and they certainly hold there prices well. Even the ebay prices are close to the retail price.

Right now its much more efficient for me to build a home server because I have all the parts.

I expect I’ll consider going for a NAS because its a lot quieter and it just works, which means I won’t need to do much to it. However running a machine means you can do a lot more. I’m running Ubuntu 10.4 desktop edition on top of my server right now. I had considered switching to Ubuntu Server but I quite like having a gui. I also use Webmin to control the box remotely. Webmin is good but its not as powerful as I would like it to be. For example I’m considering moving my torrent app to the server but controlling it would be a issue.

Right now I’m moving most of the stuff to a couple of drives so I can shift over to Windows Home Server. I tried freenas and others but I think Microsoft have come up trumps with Windows Home Server. My only problem is the fact it prefers to be installed on a blank system so that means shifting all my data around on to a couple of drives then moving them away while I install windows. Shame I deleted all my photos in the conversion. Oh well, wish I still had upto date dvd backups.

Microsoft’s forward vision

I don’t get it.

Ubuntu can be a server or a user system but its certainly not a home server. I have no idea what happened to the ubuntu homeserver project but Microsoft have got the upper hand when it comes to servers in the home.

There is a large enough difference between a server in a home and server in a data centre. Microsoft understood this when they launched Windows Home Sever. They could have just re-bundled Windows Server but no they brought out a different cut of Windows Server focused on the home market. Its also different enough from a NAS (network attached storage device) due to its great range of Apps or Add-ons.

I’m not the only one to say this either.

95% of the would-be “nixers” are completely stunned, at that point when the Ubuntu Server installation states that it has finished and all that’s offered to the user is a black screen and a prompt line. Users … basically scrap the whole thing, install Windows and use … solutions which lack raw power but come with an comprehensive interface”

Like all the others I’m pleased to see that you decided to continue this project. I’m a new NAS end user: i first bought a Synology DS410j, but i realized quickly that the processor was far too limited for me. So I made a 4 bay NAS by myself, counting on freenas. My problem is that i use linux a lot (I have a Mythtv server), but i don’t know FreeBSD at all. So the promise of a linux based NAS is a very good news. You can’t blame people to defend their chapel. Don’t listen to them, walk and see ! I assure you that i’ll be among the first switchers and the first donators because your work is useful, there’s no doubt about that.

The closes thing to Windows Home server on Ubuntu is maybe Freenas (which requires you to format all your drives into UFS for the best use, oh and its BSd based. Theres also Amahi which takes over too much of your system (it likes to control the dns, which is a pain if you got a good router).

So what makes a home server?

  • Low Minimum System Requirements
  • Simple Storage Space Management
  • Scalable Architecture
  • Cross-Platform Client Support
  • File/Data Server.
  • Backup/Restore
  • Printer Server
  • Network Functions
  • Remote Access from the Internet

Windows home server does all this really well, Ubuntu Server edition falls very short.

What else is out there? Because to be honest I’m very close to installing Windows Hone server on my home server.

Open Media Vault looks pretty good but its not quite mature enough yet.

Canonical really need to get moving with this stuff… Microsoft had the vision to kick this off, now its time for Linux to lead this area. Just like how Android is now stiring up the mobile world.