How To: Power Efficient & Low Budget Home Servers

[satturn]

Hey guys,

I'm currently looking at how to set up home servers, primarily as a file server and print server. And I realise some people are also interested in such setups as well.

Servers as what most people know are like for enterprise and the cost of such setups are not feasible for home uses. However, home servers do not need to be expensive and high end hardwares.

So this thread is meant for those who want to set up home servers and have spare components which they can use to set up a home server enough for their use. It also meant for people who wants to use power efficient processors usually used for laptops which will help to reduce the power consumption.

Hope this will be useful for many people.

Cheers,
naro

PS: Those who are well-versed on such stuffs are welcomed to contribute to this thread. After which i'll update the first few posts i've reserved below to be updated. Thanks

[Alaron]

Do you Need a Server?: http://www.pcmech.com/article/do-you-need-a-server/

Creating a Web/File Server: http://www.pcmech.com/article/creati...ebfile-server/

Build Your Own Server: http://www.pcmech.com/byos/introduction/

[piasabird]

There are different ways to do this. It depends how fancy you want to get.

For a File server you could go out and buy really expensive server operating system. However, you could just take an old computer or any low end computer like a cheap Dell and put a couple large hard drives in it, and put any operating system on it you want. You could use XP or you could use something like SUSE Linux. Linux is pretty cheap and you can probably download it or get a free copy from someone. It can be set up to store files into directories with user rights. Linux is a bit complicated, only because it can do so many different things, and all the programs have names that dont make much sense except to other Linux people.

A low power system is a little bit harder to quantify. Intel Makes some nice low power (50 watt) Xeon Processors. However, the motherboards may be really pricey. Hell even the processors may be kind of pricey. That is the problem with Xeon's. Most modern processors still use quite a bit of power.

Some people have been using these cheap Via processors. They are definitely low power. However, they can be a pain to deal with. The motherboards are smaller (mini-itx), and then you dont have much room for cable routing.

Some companies like Gigabyte may have some motherboard solutions for a Pentium M Processor. Another route might be to look at some bare-bones kits that come in these type of Cube style cases.

Maybe this might be a good idea?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...2E16856101480R

Some other companies may have some other solutions. Microsoft was suppose to be developing a new home server operating system but I dont think they planned to sell them to consumers. They wanted to sell the OS to OEM's who were going to make products to sell to consumers as home servers, or backup devices. It had some fairly good reviews.

[edfair]

For the server boxes small older stuff running Linux would be fine. I've got several up and intermittently running on surplus Dell GX1s that I picked up for $10 each.

But unless you are planning on thousands of pages a day the little converter box print servers that plug into the Centronics port on printers will serve the purpose. You name them and assign an IP address and start using them.