Home Server Building Project
 

So i'm looking to build a Ubuntu Server to serve some purposes in my house. I'm looking at configuring multiple things on this server. I don't know much about linux but want to learn how to set stuff up and manage a server. I'm going with ubuntu because i have some familiarity with that linux wise.

Now firstly i've been trying to grasp the concept of VPS's. I don't think i will need to emulate anything to make virtual servers. As i'm trying to understand it, these are just processes that can all run off of one main server and function together. All of these will run along side each other (on the same box) with out causing problems. correct?

RAID - I just want simple RAID 1 for data backup purposes. 2 1TB harddrives. Is a RAID card necessary for linux to run RAID 1? Anything (difficult) I should know about RAID 1 and ubuntu server?

Here is a overview.

Reverse Proxy
-Pound
Web Page Server
-LAMP
FTP Server
-ProFTPD
Email Server
-Postfix
-Courier IMAP
-MySQL
-Amavisd-new
-SpamAssassin
-ClamAV
-Cyrus SASL
-PostGrey
-TLS
-SquirrelMail
Jabber Server
-eJabberd
Music Server
-Tangerine
Print Server
Firewall

I'm also needing a few other things I want done as well. I want to be able to use it as a downloading server for torrents as well. How i'm seeing this in my head, is that all other pc's in my house will run windows xp so it must be able to interface with them to share files, etc. Ubuntu seems to work pretty well with that via Samba.

Is there a way i can open a torrent file on say my xp laptop and send the torrent file to the server (since it will have a faster wired connection), and it would auto download, or would i have to first connect to the server and download the torrent file on there and execute it from there? Can i forward particular torrent files to the server for auto download? Whenever it would receive a torrent file request it would auto open a client to download it, and download the file in a folder of my choosing?

DVR Service - Don't know how this would fit in too. I have a nice plasma with HD service through comcast (internet as well), and i'm not paying them for a DVR when I can make my own for free with more space.

I'm looking to record tv shows/movies to the RAID 1 array, in SDTV & HDTV. Can this be configured on the server as well?

All of the server loads will be small. 1-3 users on my email server, 1-2 users on jabber server, me only on the FTP server. So i'm not going to use tons of resources or anything. Planning on running all of these things off of a AMD X2 2.x GHz, 1.5GB RAM, 1TB RAID. Would that pc be fine for this?

Hi Cegha,

Looks like you have a lot of work ahead of you.. it may be worth practising in a vm before you do your actual server build. As far as raild goes, you can do software raid but hardware raid performs better,

good luck

kbp

As a start to vps.... you can try virtual box or vmware server, both of which are free and has a linux version too. In case of a simple vps.... you ll be creating virtual machines and each virtual machine will have its own virtual hard disk and OS and of course a virtual network including virtual routers n so on.....

My repeated use of the word virtual, should give you the idea that everything behaves like a normal physical server except that everything is... um... virtual.

So in your case the host system, the server with ubuntu, will run the virtualization software like virtual box or vmware.... and inside this software you ll create virtual machines(guest systems) with the software and OS that u need...

Yes these virtual machines will run together without any problems, just like multiple physical systems do...

However since the virtual machines share the resources of the host system, the resources on the host system will cause limitations.....

But why a VPS if you want to run a server? VPS is more for letting multiple parties run separate servers from one computer isn't it? I use Debian to run all my server stuff (Apache, MySQL, FTP, Mail, etc) using ISPConfig. It's currently running 5 different domain named websites. Then I use VMWare and VirtualBox for running virtual desktops of Windows(XP, Vista, 7) when I want to play around.

I was just misunderstanding what a VPS is meant to do. I was thinking the ubuntu server can only be configured for one thing. However that is not the case, it's just simply a bunch of processes's running to make the server do multiple things. I was confused at weather one box could form all of those servers or if i would have to make virtual servers to do each job.

A raid card is not necessary. Personally, I don't like the cheap raid cards, so I'd want to try the multi-disk (md) driver before trying a raid card. If you were trying to use one of the raid modes that does cleverer things with the data, and you needed a high throughput or low cpu loading, there is a case that having a hardware XOR engine. This isn't true in your case, so I don't see that this is a factor.

That's quite a list of things that you want to set up. Depending on how busy these things are, it may prove a bit much for one server (if you were in an enterprise situation with thousands of users, it surely would, but, in a lower load situation you could well get away with it).

But, given that there is an overhead with virtualisation, if that workload would be too much for a single server unvirtualised, it would be even worse if you virtualised everything.

Stuff like serving web pages will work, albeit slowly, if the server is loaded quite heavily. It may be irritatingly slow, but only you can decide when irritating turns to unusable.

Things like video serving and recording are different. They are more of a soft real time load and if the server is so heavily loaded that there are multiple dropped frames, you could find it very quickly becomes intolerable, so be careful.