'Hardy for the Home - Part One: Gearing Up'
One of the projects that’s kept me busy for the past couple of months (30 minutes at a time…) has been the realization of my home server strategy. I’ve decided to start a multi-part series on both the hardware and software setup that I’ve chosen and will link to some key resources for anyone who might want to take on a similar project.
In the house, we’ve got four computers running various editions of OS X and Windows. What I’ve been looking for is a solution which would serve all these platforms seamlessly.
The first part of the project was to sift through the guts of all the computers that I had in my house and see if I could get something put together which would serve the duty of the home server. The server needed to perform a few specific functions:
Backup Server
Web Server (LAMP)
SFTP Server
DNS Server In addition, I may extend the capabilities of the server to include:
VMWare Server
TorrentFlux Client With those requirements in mind I set about scrounging through the working, and not-so working hulks that I had laying around the basement. I was able to come up with the following configuration:
P4 1.5GHz
512MB DDR SDRAM
3 NICs (Onboard + 2 – will explain later)
DVD Burner (just in case)
2x 80GB IDE Drives
1x 40GB IDE Drive The first priority is to get some backups going for the house and get some of our data copied. There were two priorities for the backup: seamless and automatic. This last item is particularly important because as many experts have noted a backup is useless unless it will happen automatically for you. If you have to think about it, you won’t do it.
After looking at the hardware configuration it was obvious I was going to need some additional storage. 2 80GB drives would hardly do to backup data from four separate computers. So I picked up a 500GB Western Digital MyBook.
And with that the gear was complete. Now all I had to do was image the franken-box with a copy of Hardy Heron and actually put it to use.