K’s Weblog

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.

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