I’m about to buy myself a small server for home. I want it to do the following:
- manage profiles and permissions for three users
- run Subversion and Trac for my dev projects
- provide a development environment(s) for the same projects
- perform backups of data from other machines and itself, probably
- manage BitTorrent activity
- manage all our multimedia
- other stuff…
I’m thinking of using VMWare for parts of this, such as the dev server. Other parts will obviously be native. Something like this setup at HowToForge would be ideal for the dev and BitTorrent stuff.
So, in terms of hardware and software, what do you folks recommend? Feedback appreciated.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Only 3 users?! What about guests and visitors?!
Normal advice with hardware: Get as much RAM, CPU and disk as you can afford – as you’re going to want multimedia storage, maybe trade a bit of RAM and CPU for disk.
You want mirrored disks, you really do – possibly an external one for backups too.
You don’t really say what you want to ‘manage’, so that standard answer of a recent popular Linux distro applies.
Hey Stephen,
I have been running a setup similar to this for over 1 year now. Contact me at my email address and I’ll be happy to give you the specs of what I am running, and some advice on the setup.
Supermicro (http://www.supermicro.com/) makes some nice and inexpensive servers. You can usually get them cheap on eBay.
hey another cool thing… http://www.torrentflux.com/ … for the BitTornado… i’m running a duron 500/128 ram with all I need, svn,trac,apache,php5,sql5, on slackware…
derr.. read the links first.. post about later…
xD
but slackware…. really cool… all plain text….
ubuntu for desktop thing…