Hi!

I have an old home server running Windows Server 2003(!). It has a dual core 2,2 GHz Celeron processor and 2 Gigs of RAM. It's been running 24/7 for over 10 years now on very cheap hardware and has been working very well. I've only had to replace fans and upgrade hard drives over the years. I primarily use it for storage, but I also use it to control the lighting in my apartment with a USB transceiver, Eventghost and cheap wireless switches. I also use a special solution to run a VM with Windows XP on it to run some old software I can't run under Wine on my computer, and that I want to have available even with my computers off. As for storage, I don't use RAID or anything like that, just five NTFS formatted drives. For backup I use external USB drives and I use robocopy via a script to perform backups. I also have an internal drive for backup of files that changes on a daily basis.

Obviously I need a replacement. This would have to be cheap hardware. But the main problem is what to run on it, here are a few options:

1. Hypothetically speaking, some slightly newer version of Windows Server (like 2012) would be ideal, but with activation and all, I would have to trust some dodgy piece of software to keep it "activated". (Microsoft should really have a special reasonably priced (100$ tops) license for DIY'ers.)

2. Some free NAS software. Could work, but I wouldn't be able to use the machine for anything else than storage. Guess I could use a Raspberry Pi for the lighting, but I wouldn't be able to use the same software, so I would have to learn and setup a completely different system for this. I also have no idea how or if it would work with backups to external drives.

3. Some Linux server distro. It would be nice to run Linux on a new server, since I've been using Linux for my computers for about 10 years, but it would be a way too steep learning curve to get the same functionality, especially with the lack of a GUI. I just wouldn't have the time to setup a Linux-based solution that I could trust, with a baby to attend to and with the concentration problems I have due to medical reasons.

I would be grateful for any tips and suggestions here, as I'm not expecting my server to run forever.

All the best!

About the only thing that separates a Linux "server" distro from a regular distro is the lack of GUI and perhasps some desktop applications. That's because, in the Enterprise, most servers sit in racks in data centers and are administered remotely via the command line.

There is no reason you could not use a Linux distro with a GUI and configure it to work as a server while still having the convenience of a GUI when you would find it helpful.

I'd recommend a mainstream distro, such as Debian, Mageia, or Slackware for such a task.

Totally agree with frankbell. Windows server is probably thousands of dollars I imagine. Never bought a copy and never would because I have no need for it so really have no idea how much it costs.

The one caveat would of course be your software that runs on Windows. If it doesn’t run in wine, is there an open source replacement ?

plenty of tutorials here for setting up a server
https://www.howtoforge.com/

Thank you for your replies! I have installed Debian as a VM now to experiment with it to see if it could be a viable option and if I can get everything to work in a satisfactory way. But it will be a lot of time and trial and error and I hope my old server will run until I can figure things out. I will need to be able to run a VM in the background (with a Windows installation for the lighting control) without being logged in. Is this possible with Virtualbox? Obviously I must test this part on a physical machine, since I don't think I can run a VM inside a VM.

There may be some distro's that still have internal differences between server and desktop/workstation but for most home users they'd never notice it I'd think.

It is possible to run a vm within a vm, (nested).

It is possible to get the free version of hyper-v if you want to play with that.
Proxmox and a few others are similar in that approach.

Might be possible to upgrade from server 2003 even to W10 by the free upgrade path maybe?

For almost every SOHO user the top distro's can all be used as a nas, workstation and server. Opensuse, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and Centos get mentioned a lot as top used I'd guess.


I personally might consider a dedicated nas as they have ability to run VM's and hdmi out on some.