Linux home server
Running and setting up your own personal server is not difficult to do. But one should keep in mind that there are other aspects involved when setting up a computer intended to run all day, all year round.
A noisy computer can have a serious impact on the peaceful environment your home provides, so the server needs to be quiet. Having your server running every day of the year can have a negative impact on your electricity bill, so the server needs to be energy efficient.
Uses:
The most popular use of a server is to have it set up as a file server, a file server store files on your home network. With networked hardware like Video-games, DVD-players and media streamers having your media files on one central location can be a smart and elegant solution. But there are other uses of a server to, you can set it up as a print server enabling anyone in your house to print files on a central printer, you can run a server as a firewall, a router or a web-server sharing your own webpage, the possibilities are endless.
The plan:
The case should have a small footprint so that the server would fit into a living room at home. The computer should be almost silent so not to disturb the peaceful nature of a living room. It shouldn’t consume a lot of electricity. Should run Linux.
Hardware:
We used the Mini-ITX motherboard manufactured by VIA. It is a small motherboard the size of 17 x 17 centimeters with all necessary hardware integrated. It has graphics, sound and network integrated. One PCI slot is available. The processor is running at 800 MHz which in reality feels more like an Intel Celeron 300 MHz in real world applications. That’s fine for our uses since a simple home server does not need a lot of horse power. The motherboard needs a case and we used an old case for two 5.25 units. We added 512 MB memory and an 80 GB harddrive. We also bought a small Micro-ATX power supply that fit our case. The PSU have an 80 mm fan but it is temperature controlled and rarely spins up to a noise level that can be heard.
Software:
We installed Linux as our operating system of choice.
Thoughts:
We are very satisfied with our new home server. It is very silent and consumes about 50-55 watt on average. We can also use it as a desktop computer since we installed KDE. It sits quietly under my desk and shares files on our network, download files and waits for FTP connections.
The Linux server in a small case