Just upgraded an old Dell Optiplex
 

because the case is bulletproof and I may be a hoarder because I can't make myself throw away anything. Anyway, it has two hard drives, a WD Green that is 1TB and a WD Blue that is 320GB. The blue ran constant for a couple years but is still doing ok after sitting idle in a closet for about 4 months. The Green one is the hdd out of a Clickfree backup device that saw almost no use. I formatted and put windows 7 starter on both and they are both running well at the moment. Yeah I know, 7 starter sucks but it was free. I have 5 laptops, and 3 home brew PCs on a KVM with room for one more machine. Since I obviously don't need another computer, I am thinking server. My question is why would I want a home server? I do have a couple websites that are hosted by Go Daddy and it would be cool to host them myself. Would I have to change anything? Dump one of the hdds? Install Slack 14.2, Any ideas?

Ok want this to be a web host, was thinking for my own websites. I keep running into people doing this but they all use crap with apt-get. I don't have mint, or ubuntu or any of that other crap. I got slack 14.2. So any idea where to begin with this?

Apache Comes with Slackware
 

The Apache HTTP Server comes with Slackware. You could spend some time playing with that and seeing how it works.

Point your browser to localhost or localhost/manual

The configuration file is at /etc/httpd/httpd.conf

At least that's where the files are on my 14.1 machine.

Of course there are different web servers available to run on your system and there's a whole host of network and security issues to deal with, but you could play with Apache to start.

Thanks Traci
 

Will try that, it is actually what I was looking to do.

Only you could know why you want something... Home servers are good for file sharing, printer sharing, etc... but running a reliable 100%up web server needs DNS server, backup dns server, backup generator for power outages, etc... and most of this is already taken care of by most data centers... so IMHO you are better off hosting your domains on the cloud somewhere than at home...

I had very bad luck with the 1TB WD Green drives and so I say dump it and keep the WD Blue drive.

The greenness of the drive comes from power savings caused by constantly parking the drive when idle. Unfortunately this causes the green drives to live very short lives.

If you must keep the drive lookup the -J option of the hdparm command.

Run the smartctl -a or smartctl -x command against both of the drives to get some idea of the wear and tear.

File sharing is sounding more and more like a good idea. Wouldn't that be the same as the cloud? I don't cloud so forgive my ignorance.

The good news is this is just an extra tower that could blow up and that would be ok, further both hd's were free so if they crap no big deal. However I do have smaller SDD I could use in the event of an emergency.

They are similar in that they both provide ways to get files to multiple computers, but they use different methods.

All "the cloud" really boils down to, is that it is someone else's computer on the internet. Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, etc all are cloud services and they are just clusters of computers at multiple locations (for redundancy and speed) and you can access them from almost anywhere. Most of these are proprietary and will either require monthly or yearly payments and/or have limits in place (number of files, size of files, transfer rates, etc).

File sharing, in this context, is mainly used to describe methods to, well, share files, but this time across your local computers. This typically means any computers within your house that are connected to the same router, either via wires or wireless. There are a number of services included within a full Slackware install, however the most common are probably samba or NFS (depending on how you look at it, FTP, SFTP, and a few others could be lumped into this group). The only limits with file sharing are typically your harddrive space and interface speeds (if you are on wireless, you'll be limited to the speed of that wireless). However, services aren't generally available outside of your network (with a few exceptions like the ftp and sftp I mentioned earlier -- however, you'd need to open up ports on your router and/or firewall to enable these to work).

With many filesharing services, they can be added to your machine so they are easy to interact with. Many cloud services require proprietary software to access or be limited to using webpages for browsing/updating, but it is typically easier to use the cloud if you're sharing things beyond your network.

If you're interested in more of this, let us know what you'd like to do and you can get some suggestions :)

Tks Bass. I was really wanting to host my sites, but there seems to be far more to that than I can attend too. I only have a couple sites, go daddy thinks I cannot live without them just as the others have since 2001 when I launched. It pisses me off and I would love to show them, however, I am on a satellite because I am in the heart of rural Texas, coming to you live from a 40 acre farm at Trading House lake.

My sister in law was doing my taxes and mentioned that all her files are in the cloud. She and computer guy husband swear by it. When I say computer guy, I mean retired US Aemy and only knows windows, in fact thinks that windows 10 is the best yet, blech.

So I have an extra tower with two drives. A WD green 1tb and a blue 320gb. It has 4gb RAM in two sticks, and this is max for the mb it is using. I have four towers on one monitor, keyboard and mouse, all cable direct from the router, so yeah a KVM that I can look when I need to at any of them. Web hosting was one idea, file server,(my own cloud) was another. Is there anything else and how limited are my options given my gps situation?

You are actually able to host a website, provide a cloud service, and provide local file sharing, all with one computer. Being on satellite isn't necessarily a bad thing for hosting a site and/or cloud service, except, depending on your connection speeds, it could be slow or intermittent. So, depending on what you need to host and how critical it is would be a deciding factor on whether you could host it locally. I have both... a website that is hosted by 1and1, and another one that I have on my server at home (using a free domain from the .tk guys).

Apache is the defacto standard for hosting webpages on Linux and Slackware includes it by default in a full install. There's loads of guides available if you're interested in getting one set up. You can provide your own cloud service using something like OpenCloud, although, I've never tried doing that.

Local file sharing can be accomplished using NFS or Samba, with Samba being a bit more Windows friendly, but a little harder to set up. As with apache, there's loads of guides available to help you set it up.

That machine would be more than capable of hosting those services. You don't even need a monitor for them as they can all work without X being loaded.

Critical, not very. I run a website for my wife's farm business which has become a petting zoo, her friend's goat farm which is a business, and the Iron Allegiance M/C. Other than keeping them updated and running it is not a whole lot to it. So yeah if I could do that, share files with the other 8 computers in the house and host a small cloud for my in-laws tax business that would be cool. So would I need the drives I have installed or could I get away with the smaller but far better SSD?

It depends on the size requirements for the website and the cloud hosting. You only need as much space as those require. And what cloud services do your in-laws business require?

Completely unsure of what their requirements are and I am fairly certain they don't know either.