Linux Ubuntu Home Server

S

Spartaniz

Expert Member
Joined
Oct 7, 2008
Messages
1,259
Reaction score
14
Location
Johannesburg
Hey guys,

I want to setup a Dedicated home server. Now i never done this before, but i cant see any disadvantages except the setup costs.

I dont have any equipment as of yet, i want everyone to connect to the internet through the server, all my torrent and nzb downloads must also be done on the server, all through webui. also wanna be able to stream music, videos from the server.

is this all possible? if so, what will the costs be to setup such a dedicated box? also, i dont have a problem with keeping the box 24/7 on, but what about overheating or fans failing or something?

can someone give me the costs involved in setting something like this up and if its possible please!!!
 
well.....

The pc would cost about however much you can afford. the more the better. You would need a minimum of a quad core with about 4 gigs of ram, maybe a couple of raided tb drives... I'm guessing about R12k here. More if youve got it.

Assuming your home network is already in place, Ubuntu with all the software you would need is free.

Time spent and years of life lost sweating blood setting the thing up. Priceless!

:p

I am currently in the proccess of changing my xp home media server into an Ubuntu media server. I have a mid range quad core with 4 gigs of ram and 2 1.5 tb drives (not raided).

All I still have to do is test the media server (tonight) and get the Neotel line working (its been a week or so now). :rolleyes:
 
It does not have to cost you anything if you have a old PC lying around...

You certainly don't need a fancy schmancy server for a home network. Just pop a few large Hard disks in that old PC and install any Linux distro...

You don't need a screen or keyboard after Linux is installed...
 
Forgot to say...

If you don't put the server in a cupboard there won't be problems with overheating and such... just check and clean all the fans once a while...
 
Last edited:
Spartaniz said:
cool thanks, what should the minimum specs be of this pc?
Click to expand...

Get yourself :

1. the cheapest Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, an Intel motherboard with onboard graphics

2. two 1TB or 750GB hard drives (they are cheap nowadays!)

3. and 2GB/4GB RAM (even cheaper).

That should do the trick. :)
 
got an old mac mini g4 ( 256mb ram ) running ubuntu server, webmin for admin, transmission/clutch for torrents ( cron to start at 12 and stop at 8 - cybersmart night rider!! ) , smb/cifs and netatalk/avahi for file sharing, dnsmasq for dhcp and dns caching, http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Music_Player_Daemon_Wiki for music - lots of different clients for controlling it ( cellphone notebook etc ) sound out to an amp and a big external drive for storage , squid proxy. wouldn't have been much more work to add a second pppoe connection and split local and int'l traffic. http://za.net will give you a free domain and zoneedit.com will let you update your A records with a script form your server so it'll be accessible from outside your house as well. all software FREE, hardware negligible cost and the machine was never really sweating
 
kingrob said:
Get yourself :

1. the cheapest Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, an Intel motherboard with onboard graphics

2. two 1TB or 750GB hard drives (they are cheap nowadays!)

3. and 2GB/4GB RAM (even cheaper).

That should do the trick. :)
Click to expand...

sjoe seems good enough. what wil the price be?
 
andrmash said:
got an old mac mini g4 ( 256mb ram ) running ubuntu server, webmin for admin, transmission/clutch for torrents ( cron to start at 12 and stop at 8 - cybersmart night rider!! ) , smb/cifs and netatalk/avahi for file sharing, dnsmasq for dhcp and dns caching, http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Music_Player_Daemon_Wiki for music - lots of different clients for controlling it ( cellphone notebook etc ) sound out to an amp and a big external drive for storage , squid proxy. wouldn't have been much more work to add a second pppoe connection and split local and int'l traffic. http://za.net will give you a free domain and zoneedit.com will let you update your A records with a script form your server so it'll be accessible from outside your house as well. all software FREE, hardware negligible cost and the machine was never really sweating
Click to expand...


wait uh say what? i have an old dell 256ram running xubuntu using transmission-daemon and webui.- the rest of your post made me confused! lol
 
I have been planning on doing the same. Picked up a C2D 3.0 recently, has about 3tb of hdd space. Have windows on it for now, going to try setting up my old AMD 64 first, and then clone the drive to the C2D machine. Would this be advisable? Thinking of running ubuntu server 64.
 
Spartaniz said:
wait uh say what? i have an old dell 256ram running xubuntu using transmission-daemon and webui.- the rest of your post made me confused! lol
Click to expand...

sorry, did run on a bit - have included the links for more info

webmin - a web based interface for doing updates and configuring services, maintining users, checking disk space, etc, etc http://www.webmin.com

transmission - bittorrent client ( I think clutch was the old name for the web UI ) , a cron job pauses the torrents during the day and resarts them at night to take advantage of the cheaper bandwidth available with cybersmarts night rider package
http://www.transmissionbt.com/

dnsmasq - dead easy to configure dhcp server and DNS cache, allows other devices on your network to get ip addresses, default routers, dns servers, etc http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html

mpd - Music Player Daemon (MPD) is a flexible, powerful, server-side application for playing music. Through plugins and libraries it can play a variety of sound files while being controlled by its network protocol.
http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Music_Player_Daemon_Wiki

for accessing the machine from outside of the LAN since we dont have static IP addresses, I registered a domain and provided http://www.zoneedit.com as the DNS server - on their site they have scripts which allow the machine on the lan to update its DNS records ( like dyndns or tzo except you can use your own domain name for free)

squid - a caching proxy server - probably not necessary on a small network

smb/cifs - normal windows file shares
netatalk - apple's file sharing protocol
avahi/bonjour/Zeroconf - allows the server to advertise services ( like shares or printers ) to the local network
 
Spartaniz said:
is there a local dyndns service????
Click to expand...

Hmm, not too sure if there is a free one... but you can maybe check this one out. http://activedns.co.za/

I installed NO-IP2 yesterday on my ubuntu server... seems to be working, as I can ping myself through my dyndns address, but i am quite sure no-ip2 is not local.
 
Hi,
Not sure if anyone has mentioned or seen AMAHI Home Server. Go have a look at www.amahi.org
At the moment they only have Fedora but are working on a UBUNTU version. Works great.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X