Hey guys,

I'm putting together a server for use in the home. I'd like to get some advice and suggestions. I've been researching many different things over the past few days and now I guess I'm just going to throw 'em all down and see what you guys think.

and because I'm doing a fairly large amount of new stuff (new for me) I'm going to put together some howto's to help those that come after me.

List of things i'd like to do:
1. Settle on which OS I'll be using in the server.
2. Buy and setup new hardware for storage.
3. Remote in to the server and control it however I need from pc's in the home
4. Serve up files that I could access via the internet
5. Serve up files for access via my ps3 and xbox360
6. And lastly, I'd like to have the server perform backups from all the other pc's in the home.

1. I think I want to use the latest version of Ubuntu, (currently 8.10) to do all of this. I've heard talk of other options like centOS and freenas, but I'm familiar with ubuntu and open suse and kinda wanted to stick with that. is there any advantages to using something like freenas over Ubuntu, or even perhaps Ubuntu server? (not afraid of the command line, but certainly not used to a command line only setup.)

2. First thing I've been looking into is storage. I've finally settled on some hardware and idea's. The PC i'm doing this with is quite old and so it doesn't have the necessary amount of connectors for hard drives. First thing I've done was to find a pci controller card. The one I settled on is the Promise SATA300 tx4 (pci sata controller.) I wanted to get a raid controller card but my funds are a bit restricted. The plan is to use the card to connect 3 500gb hard drives in a software raid 5 setup. I guess i'll be using mdadm to do this. I'm open to any other input on this but keep in mind the budget aspect.

3. I've never messed around with remote logins so I'm a little lost here. I think I need to use some form of ssh. Is there a good ssh server/client software suite that would allow me to remote in and perform any maintenance? the plan is to keep the server in the basement with no I/O devices to control it directly.

4. For accessing data off the server, via wherever, I'm thinking of using Apache. Again here i've never messed with it so I'm not real sure how it works or if there are any better options. If apache sounds like it's the way to go I'm sure I can find some howto's but any links would be great.

5. As far as serving data to the consoles goes, I actually have some experience. I've used Mediatomb (with some tweaking for divx) to serve up files to the PS3. I have not tried with the xbox360 yet but i'm pretty sure It won't be much of an issue to get them working together.

6. And now were down to the Backup software part. I've never actually performed a backup before. I know, stupid right? well it's never too late. Anyways, I've seen talk about rsync thrown around in the forums...are there other options? Or is rsync the best way to go for backing up data to the server?

all suggestions and links are much appreciated.

Cheers,
Shload

This may help in general www.linuxhomenetworking.com (not Ubuntu specific).

1. I'd stick with what you know, so either of those (Ubuntu/opensuse) will be fine. If you've chosen Ubuntu, go with it.

3. SSH is installed by default on most distros, dso expect that to be the case with Ubuntu. Most linux distros have ssh clients, so nothing needed there. The usual Windows client in Putty (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/)

4. Depends what sort of stuff you want to access, and from what you want to access it. See initial link for apache howto. Also see ubuntu wiki.

5. I would have suggested mediatomb anyway.

6. Depends what you are backing up from and to. At home, I have all my client machines keep their data on the server, so it makes life simpler. rsync will work if the clients are linux, not sure about Windows, but you could possibly access their shares using samba. Not my field.

Hpoe that helps a bit.

1. Personally I don't like ubuntu much as a file server as I have had some problems with authentication taking up to ten secs, I use fedora for everything. http://fedoraproject.org/

It has worked very reliably and very quickly for me. (Running on a 750mhz with 512 ram)

2. I understand the budgeting I believe the pci cards can be setup for raid as they usually have a built in raid chip, I have one myself during boot up I get a brief message about Configuring the raid controller (about 2-5 secs), I have looked at it, but never changed the setting by default it just acts as a HDD controller (non-bootable).

3. Putty is the way to go, very simple and powerful tool, another one I have found is tunneler, http://www.bitvise.com/tunnelier Tunneler gives you a number of features including a GUI for transferring files to and from the linux box.

Tunneler does the same thing as putty, with slightly different features

You will need to install one of these two apps on all the computers you want to control from, (putty is 444KB, Tunneler is 4.2 MB) Both apps have been setup for U3 Flash drives if you have one.

The other option requiring no install is telnet, which may require some setup on the server, but it has the benefit of already being on all your other machines.


4. Using putty or tunneler, you can transfer files from what every computer you are on and your server, again tunneler has a GUI for this while putty is all command line. (Tunneler is a bit faster, especially if you are browsing because you don't know where the file is, )

For a web server or putty/Tunneler you'll have to open and forward the ports on your router. 80 for web and 22 for SSH = Secure Shell(putty/tunneler service), the advantage of SSH is that all the information is 128bit (or 256bit) encrypted and is protected by a user name password by default. A Con though is that you have to have an SSH client on the end machine. (putty.exe can just be put on a flash drive and run from there as it has no other file dependencies)

With the web page it is easy to access, but default has no username or password (but one can be added) Web would be fine for movies or music, but you would want to avoid it for things like a resume or other sensitive information.

You could also setup a FTP, that requires login, but it has the same advantages and disadvantages as web, except it's slightly faster then a web transfer.

5. I really have no idea as I don't own any consoles

6. I can think of two of things you can do:

A. Setup a samba share http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/...TO-Collection/ and then setup each computer to use the server as a network drive. Then run a scheduled task on each computer every X on Folders Y and Z to be copied to the network drive.


B. Create a shared folder on all the computers and write a linux script to copy all contains of said folder, to a folder stored on the server and the script can be written to save or overwrite existing files.


There is probably some open source software out there somewhere that can help you with this, freenas is just a file server and doesn't have a system that could handle any more then it does.

Feel free to ask me for more details on any of this.

Good luck,
Vischa

Any version of linux is fine. There is nothing that can "only" be done on a particular version of linux. If you like the setup on Ubuntu, then by all means use Ubuntu. The same applies to Fedora, Debian, Slackware, etc.

Rsync absolutely is what you'll want to use for backing up, either rsync or rsyncd. There are open source rsyncd packages for windows. Google around for them. The backuppc project has them on its sourceforge page, and there have been a few GUI versions of them to come out in the last few months. The reason rsync is much preferred over things like ftp is it is a "smart" system. Rsync has the brains to say, "this identical file is already on the backup server, therefor I don't need to transfer it again." Simply copying things over samba/windows shares, you lose that functionality. It will copy every file in every share every time. If you're talking about 100 Mb of documents that isn't a big deal on a LAN, but dealing with 20 GB of data, where 19.8 of it doesn't change between backups, rsync/rsyncd is absolutely the way to go.

Peace,
JimBass