I'm looking at getting a server at home.
Is it worth buying old servers, or building a shitty one, or what?
I'm looking to spend about $300 on the server itself minus the hard drives.
Are there any around that pricerange that accept 3.5" SAS drives? Or am I stuck with 2.5" SAS
Old servers get you a lot of performance for cheap, but if you have it running 24/7, you will pay so much for power that it will be worth it buying a new server.
For servers, I find that white-boxing is not really worth it. Just get a TS140 or something.
HP Proliant Microserver might be worth considering.
In my experience an x3650 will idle at around 60watts which is pretty good.
The biggest problem with the X series - which is by far cheaper than the tower series for IBM servers is that all of the cheap ones are limited to 2.5" HDDs.
I'm not sure if there's a controller limitation on HDD size. 2TB+ 2.5 SAS drives exist and if you're lucky you can get them for $150
Provided you're looking for home server features and not actually hosting anything to other people, correct me if I am wrong - but I think that various synology solutions will work.
You can use them as mail servers, VPN servers, etc.
The biggest problem with the x3650 as a home server is that it is a rack server, which means it will make a fuck ton of noise. The tower servers are basically silent.
I think the controller will take up to 4 TB drives, but I'm not completely certain.
>I'm looking at getting a server at home
Why and what for?
I was going to buy some old ones but for the amount of work I have to do to get them to integrate with my current setup it's just impossible. Mine is mainly a media vault - only thing that faces outwards is a TeamSpeak server and torrents.
HP ProLiants have Smart Array controllers with no Initiator-target/passthrough mode which is necessary for software RAID. All the
Dell's I've found lack front facing hot swap bays (R210's). Most have 2.5 inch drive bays and force you to buy proprietary mounting brackets.
Be prepared to do a fuckton of research and pay a fuckload of money for extra components like LSI SAS cards and shit.
If you're looking for raw power though there's a dude selling Xeon E5-2670's on ebay for like 60 dollars.
Dell H310/200 are cheap on ebay. There are guides on flashing them since they are LSI chipsets.
I have one coming today I bought for $50 with extra bracket.
Answer this.
Storage, VPN server, Mail server, eventually host a website from home.
Last one is least important.
Unless you have majorly good Internet guarantees you do not want a mail server in your house, it's a great way to lose mail.
How important is the mail?
How many people are going to sue the website?
What kind of storage amount and access speeds are you looking at?
Is the VPN to dial home or just to reach the server for management?
*use the website.
Wtf are you talking about. Proliants can passthrough disks to an OS just fine for the purpose of software RAID, or just using the flat disk. There is no need to use their awful Smart Array bullshit; just don't configure them in the firmware and the OS will see them as connected drives.
MicroServers definitely allow you to do this.
I do most of those with a raspberry pi. I trust Gmail with my mail (added my domain as an alias). I don't stream from the storage though, just an SFTP server for myself and one other person.
For the price and electrical cost, I'm very happy.
how did you add it as an alias? Are you paying for that?
I was looking to do the same a while ago but it seems they blocked doing this for free a few years ago.
I've never seen a definitive answer on this, at least with regard to the P400, which is the controller most of the servers I was looking at use. Some say it works and others say it doesn't. I'm not willing to take a chance on that yet because then it means ordering another card and spending even more money.
Mostly looked at the DL380 G5. there seems to be millions of them being retired around where I live.
You fags need to step up your game.
Thoughts on the cheapie proliant Microserver gen 8s? The one with the celerons.
The P400 or P410 will not push disks through to OS as a JBOD. You need to RAID 0 one by one to do that.
How did you set that up on your rasp pi?
>How important is the mail
I would prefer to keep it here is all
>How many people are going to sue the website
It will get shut down, but probably not sued.
>What kind of storage
8TB would be ample.
>Is the VPN dial to home or just to reach server
Dial to home.
I don't pay for it.
Wait, maybe I do. I forgot I put my CV on a site on A Small Orange while I was moving so I could unplug stuff. All email to, say, [email protected] get forwarded to [email protected], then I changed gmail's imap settings to let me send email as [email protected]. Once the permissions are all set, I can use Gmail like it's my personal thing.
it doesnt take much. my dl380 was under 400 shipped with 12 cores, 74gb of ram, and 8x300 sas drives. only pulls about 100 watts idle too.
compared to my ts140 which after putting 32 gigs of ram into cost in the 400-500 range, not counting the 2 6tb reds that are in it, and that thing draws 60 watts
not the op, but i'm running the same on my odroid (rasp clone).
Those boards are running linux, you can easily set up all those services and they run well enough for private use, just like on a server running on more powerful hardware.
What are some nice things to do with an LSI SAS card and 2 small 15000RPM drives?
If you want to host a shitty website from home - how much power do you need?
I'll have to check the imap settings thing. The forwarding of incoming mail is easy, my domain provides that as a service for free, but I couldn't find a way for gmail to accept sending mail from my domain without paying.
Don't do it if you don't have good bandwidth senpai
Please respond!
Set them up in RAID 0 then smash one with a hammer,
If you absolutely want it in house that's one thing, I'm just asking because I'd do it by renting a VPS for email and website and getting a microserver or NAS for home usage. Full size servers are loud, hot and don't like the same range of temperatures and humidities that people do, the power draw, ventilation and internet stability are also factors. You also get decent DR with a VPS which is nice.
If it's basically a personal website, personal email and personal files a microserver can do that easily, 8TB isn't actually a huge amount of storage to have to handle locally. You can get around 8TB usable off of 4 RAID 4 drives in either RAID6 or RAID10 and 4 3.5" drives will fit into nearly any microserver.
I was hoping for real answers
Won't have alot of power. But will save you on your electrical bill. What purpose will you be using the server for?
Challenge accepted.
I was serious.
There's not a lot of "fun" things you can do with that at all outside of creating RAID 1 or 0 arrays.
Shitty website, file server, dial to home.
Am I correct to say that this is a better choice than an old IBM X3650?
They're both similar costs.
It's raspbian with
>lighttpd for the website
>rsyncd for backups
>I forget which SFTP server, I don't think it's anything fancy.
>A script from canvas host (?) to update the dns
>A bunch of cron jobs and stuff
And, of course, a tor relay. I also have a hidden service tied to SSH so can connect to it if the domain name things breaks (which never happens, but feels good)
Dumb question: Whats the point of high amounts of ram on a server, and do you ever need it for what people have discussed here?
Can you explain how to hide who you are or where you are hosting from on your home server?
Is it easier to do it than to hide a paper trail through something like godaddy?
Most don't, no.
I do a shitload of virtualization, so even at 192GB, I'm a bit lower than I'd like to be.
It's less about hiding who I am and more about helping other people. Same I seed my torrents. I got an uptick in traffic during the Arab Spring, which felt nice.
Besides, it's just a relay; it doesn't allow any external traffic.
If you want to host a hidden service and don't want people to know it's you, they recommend not running a relay at the same time. Otherwise a dedicated attacker can just turn off the power block by block, and see what relays go down when your site does. That's not a concern for me.
Even without the Best Practices, it took them forever to find the silk road guy, even though he wasn't an expert and, in retrospect, was very sloppy.
Tl;dr if you really want to hide where you are hosting from, tor hidden service and nothing else at the same time.
If you're running VMs you want to dedicate a fair bit of RAM to each, I.e. 8GB DC, 16GB App, 32+GB TS etc, can add up quickly.
>8GB DC
8GB for a domain controller? Are you sure you really want to do that?
The difference between server@work and server@home is you pay for electricity and you don't pay your time.
...
Infotrend's support is almost as bad as EMC's, and their pricing wasn't that compelling for us.
The HP left hand SAN stuff is decent, and it will take non HP drives, if you just want one to fuck with in a lab.
I'm in the process of ordering and staging 8 R730's each w/ 2 MD1420's as a Storage Spaces Direct cluster.
For home, as this is a home server thread, I've condensed down into a single T620 for production.
Dev & test are off-site.
Nope, only 2TB drives, since 3Gb/s.
oldish pic of rack - in middle of rejigging things - yuyuko is getting replaced with 2 x HP Microserver N36L and i'll perhaps re-purpose her case with a pi cluster, see how it pans out
Just find whatever uses the least amount of power that fits your needs. Otherwise itnprobably won't be worth it.
Buy a refurbished Dell OptiPlex.
There are tens of thousands of them floating around, since they are the go-to desktop to buy in bulk.
I bought one with a 2.3Ghz i3, 4GB RAM, and 7 Professional for $100.
Gonna use it as my home server.
TS140 master race reporting in.
Running Trading bots of them so well worth the money.
TS140 checking in
Xeon processor
20gb ram (sadly)
ESXi 5.5
Currently running 6(?) VMs.
Kicks out quite the power for little costs.
Only downside is I bought it when the xeon model was only $345 with 4gb ram (onsale for $285)
Now xeon models are 400+ which makes me wish I had bought 2 or 3 then since I want a second host and a secluded single host.
Thinking of picking up a Dell T20 with the i3 in it for a nas box
Can I use a rPI cluster as a server?
yes
yes
technically yea but why?
Never spoke to EMC/Infotread, we hardly use their equipment,
Dell is pretty solid on the support
iDRAC
There are better options.
lenovator.com
Yeah, I tend to like Dell as well.
Other groups give me shit, but vs HP, for us at least, they're about 15% cheaper.
Though if I end up migrating to blades, I may have to go HP, or give Cisco's UCS a look.
I wouldn't say its better then the x3650. But it would run those services without a problem. I would probably go with the Celeron based one if you're not planning to do any type of virtualization or anything heavy
827 used desktops for $15k.
That'll make one hell of a cluster.
Can't say I've encountered a problem with that before? Core DC services only.
8GB is overkill for a SOHO DC. I run 2GB on each of mine. 2012 R2 core, yes.