Hey guys I have a spare serer in my room with FC6 on it.
Can you guys give me ideas on what to use it for?

Thanks,

nomb

you could use it for one of the many distributed computing projects like Folding@Home. A good list of them can be found at:

http://www.distributedcomputing.info/projects.html

or if you have some spare bandwidth you can donate you might consider setting up a Tor node (tor.eff.org)

or you could cram it full of old hardrives and turn it into a nice NAS server.

those are some cool things I'll probably do a few of them. I also have been running a tor server. I also wanted to make some sort of server that my friends can use for some purpose. Any ideas on that?

sure you could set up a jabber or irc server and have a medium for private chats. On the same line but a little more advanced would be setting up a mud/moo/muck. If you wanted to really give them options you could create user accounts for them and then set up an SSH server (taking the apprioriate precautions to safe guard your server of course). SSH especially with X forwarding is extremely useful, and if set up correctly it can be quite safe. As a bonus once SSH is step up SFTP is pretty much ready to go too.

Have Fun
Freemor

Very cool idea. Any suggestion on what I should use software wise?

For which of the suggestions?

If you meant SSH, I'd suggest OpenSSH. It is a very popular and secure choice for an ssh server and thus I would not be surprised if there were RPM's readily available for it for your distro. Quite possibly either in your distro's repository or on the CD/DVD media.

for the Jabber server I'd just go with the latest jabberd for your distro www.jabber.org

on the IRC front the choices are numerous and I'd not have any opinion on what would best fit your needs.

for moo/muck/mush etc.. again lots of choices but I have found that pennmush is quite nice.

if you do set up an SSH server I'd suggest going with public key access as there is a lot of people on the net trying to brute force SSH servers. restricting your server to public key access only (although a little harder to initally set up) renders such attacks impotent. (basically the server will just tell them "I don't take passwords.. go away"). Also your friends would have to leak both their public key and the password to said key for a breach to occur. Of course if they leak either of the two the key should be changed as a safety precaution.

Have Fun
Freemor

I tried looking for the moo/muck/mush and didnt find much on that. Do you happen to know a better way to find it then google moo/muck/mush? Also I had trouble with the Linux IRC client. I'm gonna try again on that one tho cause there has got to be one.

nomb

for the Mud's (moo's muck's mush's) you might want to start here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:MU%2A_servers

http://pennmush.org/

for irc servers you might want to google:

+linux +"irc servers"

or there is a list here that should get you started:

http://www.linux.com/howtos/IRC/servers.shtml


Enjoy
Freemor

Is this a MUD?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimonin

If so I'd host one of these servers.

well that is more of a MMORPG (which is what muds grew into)

if you want to run one like that you'd need the "crossfire-server" for your distro and your friends would (of course) need the crossfire client.

I know it's probably the most boring of all choices, but I had a spare box and I put backuppc on it. Every night it goes through every computer on the network and does incremental (and once a week full) backups.

If you're in a dorm of some sort it could be used by your friends as well.

Thats a cool idea. I could set up a vpn maybe to my friends computers and backup theirs too.

I have 500 gigs so I have to do something other than let it collect dust.

Nomb, yeah that's what MUDs evolved into, a MUD Multi-User-Dungeon is a text based RPG. Despite the lack of graphics their still rather popular (I'm addicted to them, have hosted them in the past, and have been playing them since I was 9 years old.) They were originally created by Dr. Richard Bartle who has pretty much retired but does do occasional interviews today.

Everybody knows the best use of any linux server, is to host an Unreal
Tournament server. (UT99 GOTY).