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Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
in General Chat
A friend of mine has done it and due to the amount of computers I have in my house I am forever swapping between computers here there and everywhere or transfering data between the them. so It has me thinking, why not get a server, I do not mean a full on proper built server but a PC to act as one,
A goodish PC with a
decent (prob dual core) processer,
3/4 x 1.5tb HDD
4gig of ram
gigabyte ethernet connection into a switch
and possibly a local only wireless router
My question is has anyone here done it? if so what are the main things that I shouldn't overlook, I want wireless for my laptops and then I want to have internal CAT5 sockets around the house. and also route my internet through the server so I can monitor traffic and set restrictions. Does anyone know of any software where I can throttle individual computer speed??
A goodish PC with a
decent (prob dual core) processer,
3/4 x 1.5tb HDD
4gig of ram
gigabyte ethernet connection into a switch
and possibly a local only wireless router
My question is has anyone here done it? if so what are the main things that I shouldn't overlook, I want wireless for my laptops and then I want to have internal CAT5 sockets around the house. and also route my internet through the server so I can monitor traffic and set restrictions. Does anyone know of any software where I can throttle individual computer speed??
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Comments
I will upgrade it to something with gigabit but tbh wireless only supports 54megabit so thats the bottleneck. it depends what you're doing but i cant imagine why you would need that much ram unless you were running it as a game server (and then a domestic internet connection wouldnt be good enough).
running xubuntu happily. dont know about using it as a router but my housemate does use his as a fileserver and its -hard- in ubuntu but powerful, very easy in windows server (though you need a shitload of memory for that, like 1gb for 2008 / 2008 R2 minimum which is silly).
I have a copy of Server 03 sitting about so thinking of using that.
In terms of the internet I am not sure how I would get it to work, I know at work we have the
Router > Switch > computers & server
so the internet is actually not going through the server to get to the other computers, which I would do if it would let me monitor ALL traffic, however I understood you get better traffic monitoring if all internet traffic actually goes through the server, however I wonder if this would increase lag...
Hmm I think the reason for the ram is because I am going to upgrade my PC to a 64bit os and stick 8gig of ram in and i'll be left with the 4gig I already have,
heck I could use my whole PC as my server and just buy/build a new PC *ponders*
I heard a few years ago that if you want a hardware firewall, you only need a 486 box for that.
Not really as my current PC has 1.5tb of data stored over a 6month period and it is growing so 4tb+ is not overkill I am aiming for about 6tb if possible
I use 4gig of ram at present and in my opinion it helps massively and means multiple operations, Eventually I am hoping to host a couple of things from the server (local programs) so it may have some load.
It also gets to run Climate Prediction.
I think it's a 2.8ghz s478 P4 overclocked to ~3.1ghz, 1gb RAM and 160gb HDD.
What are you planning on serving? 4-6tb is huge for the immediate future...
I will have 1 or 2 1.5tb drive to begin with and upgrade it slowly, I am thinking of buying the skeliton of the server,
Mobo
Ram
CPU
Drive
Case
switches
then upgraded slowly over time, extra drive, extra ram, extra so on...
Mainly it will be for file hosting, I back up all my DVD's to my computer at present, all of my games as well etc and the main thing is getting access to them from any computer, at present I have to put them on an external drive to move them etc.
My 82GB over 10½ years includes everything - even my set up files for freeware / shareware, my temp area, MP3, drivers, service packs, portable apps. Everything!
Indeed, then i also have about 100g worth music, films, lots of other tv series, games... it all adds up!
Also HD movies take up a crapton of space...
Of course all of mine are legal back ups of my dvd collection.
HD movies take a whomping amount of space.
routers don't have the ability to read or present a storage device to other network nodes. network attached storage cases on the other hand can take any 3.5" hard drive and present it to the network nodes via DNLA or similar protocol and can often do stuff like download torrents and act a print server in the background.
funny that my wireless N router is operating currently at 108mbps so I think that would suffice if alot of networks are 100mb ethernet connections.
I'll be using wireless 802.11n with at least 108mbps and a gigabyte ethernet connection.
The reason i am not going for a NAS drive is because I want run program off of the server which a NAS drive cannot do so this is out the question, I'll be honest I am not looking for alternitives as I want a server
No worries mate, glad I helped.
cpu0: AMD Athlon Model 1 ("AuthenticAMD" 686-class) 549 MHz
cpu0: FPU,V86,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,MMX
real mem = 66629632 (65068K)
avail mem = 55914496 (54604K)
wd0 at pciide0 channel 0 drive 0: <IC35L040AVVN07-0>
wd0: 16-sector PIO, LBA, 39266MB, 16383 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 80418240 sectors
wd0(pciide0:0:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 2
user filespace is 73% used.
64 MEGA bytes of ram, and 40 gigabytes of hard disk.