I am going to put a server together for my home now it has to be able to handle pc back ups and serve media to pc's and a ps3 I am aware of windows home server but given the new version does not have the drive extender in it I fear that MS is trying to kill off the whole idea, the other option is a linux distro but which one as I am abit of a linux virgin so it would have to an idiot proof install, which one would you guys recomend? thank you in advance
as far as idiot proof goes you can't go too far wrong with something ubuntu related. The install is very easy and the package manager is nice and simple. It is the first one I started with, and if some of the idiots I went to uni with can cope with it then I am sure anyone can There is plenty of support out there for ubuntu in the forums so it is good for beginners Clicky Been meaning to get into centOS as well quite soon as I hear that can work nicely as a server.
http://www.ubuntu.com/server I've been meaning to try this for a while. Might actually get around to it, but I also want to try FreeNAS with ZFS again to see if they updated it. As for auto-backups, the current Win Home Server will do all that, but it isn't that great tbh.
If you just want to serve files, not stream them, you could just buy a NAS and sort out gigabit networking.
Last time I checked in the summer these guys had their site down, good to see them up again. I'm going to look into this again now. I'm still looking for an "easy" client that has ZFS though (ie not OpenSolaris) because it's better than UnRAID.
Got about 5TB running on mine with PS3 media server (uPnP), airvideo and tranmission. Have a look in the forum over there and install unMenu it has most of the above packages pre-built ready to install via web interface
I really like what Transmission offers, but it's just so slow compared to uTorrent last time I tried it. You can have transmission running on unRAID then - is it good? Can you install unRAID from USB key too?? /thread hijack apologies!
Runs well, maxes out my connection but I am only on 8mbps and also when your running 24/7 speed isn't as much of an issue unRAID boots and runs just from USB so HDD's are just for storage
Ah ah - does it have bandwidth scheduling though? Can I set it to stop torrents during the day? That's what I was missing last time and is a must have for me on uTorrent.
thanks for all the help guys I will have to look into this Unraid with unMenu I also found Amahi Home Server which I will also have a play with. thanks guys
I usually role my own modded Debian distro. But I have played around with FreeNAS sometime ago. It wasn't bad or anything but FreeBSD and my gigabit network don't play along to well, I got faster speeds with a linux kernel.
FreeNAS was meant to be moving to the Linux kernel this year actually, but it looks like maybe next. As soon as it does I'm jumping on it!
What made them decide to take the jump? Wouldn't this mean a total rewrite of the base code as it's based on monowall?
I just use debian lenny (specially rolled for QoS layer 7 filtering as its also my gateway) with Samba and NFS. Linux box at TV connected to server through NFS during startup. All other computers are windows so Samba works like a charm. 3TB at the moment, RAID 5 and ZFS as the file system.
Driver support. BSD is ****, whereas linux is very good. I think they want to be able to customise it and sell it to business', but I assume leave the free version bare.
It's possible now, two diffrent upload/download speeds can be defined and then changed between based on time
I use Ubuntu Server LTS with a Webmin interface. It's not quite as full-featured as the FreeNAS web interface (last time I checked, anyway) but the underlying OS (ubuntu instead of FreeNAS proper) I find is more stable, more configurable and has much better support in terms of documentation and hardware support.
http://blog.openmediavault.org/?cat=4 To quote votdev "it will be ready when it is ready". (votdev wrote FreeNAS)
