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On 06/04/13 23:15, Daniel Robinson wrote: > so what would you suggest? Fair question. Well, a good start is whatever you've got to hand. If we put aside space, power costs and all other considerations (i.e., the missus/kids/etc) then anything that's spare or obtained for free is perfect. Even if it's a piece of crap, it's probably still good enough if you just want to play or experiment. For what it's worth, if I already had a spare PC lying about with the exact specs you posted I wouldn't actually throw it away, I'd upgrade it with spares if possible and then I know several people who'd be happy to have it as a basic family computer. I just wouldn't go out of my way or spend even £1 to obtain a computer that bad, if you see what I mean. Ye olde P4s, P3s and Athlon 500MHz based beige boxes with 80Gb IDE hard drives, 32Mb gfx cards and 512Mb of RAM we've all got lurking in our lofts *are* still usable, they're just a bit past it for anything but the most basic tasks - you could stick in a couple of network cards, install a minimalistic BSD or linux firewall/router/infrastructure distro like m0n0wall or smoothwall (I've got an indestructible Dell XPS D333 doing exactly this, it's a 333MHz Pentium!) but most people don't want or need that. There comes a point where for most people, a Raspberry Pi in a case with a USB disk attached is probably the perfect home server. Cheap to buy, cheap to run, tiny footprint and endlessly configurable with linux. Obviously, some people need actual servers at home - several of us on this list seem to be using servers to run mythtv backends, weather station monitoring, home automaton and of course backup. And a whole lot of other stuff as well I'd imagine. I mostly work from home so I definitely require serious hardware here, especially as I do a lot of computationally expensive stuff (compiling and hashing mostly). For example, just behind me at the moment is my 'old' home server, which I chiefly use as my beer table now. It is fully plugged in and operational, but is effectively retired and is louder and thirstier on the juice than an actual windtunnel when it's on, so it stays off. It's a dual socket Xeon with 12Gb of ECC RAM, a hardware RAID 1 ultra320 SCSI disk mirror for the boot volume and two battery-backed Adaptec RAID cards with two HDD arrays, for 6Tb total. It has two redundant PSUs, 4x1Gb ethernet adaptors and runs CentOS like a champ. I inherited this beast many years ago for free from a client and it has served me incredibly well - but you should be able to pick up something like this for £200-£500 these days though, it's hardly very special any more. In London I still see machines like this skipped sometimes (despite the recycling laws). I guess that this is what I think of as a 'proper' home server, maybe slightly overkill, but I like my servers to actually be servers, not just crappy consumer grade PCs otherwise past their useful life. I am very, very probably in a tiny minority here though, almost nobody needs stuff like this at home. But then why not when you can pick it up for free or not much more? Actually, you know what, forget everything I've written... I'm the worst person in the world to ask for advice on home server suggestions. My entire garage is full of computers (literally, the car lives outside),and I have absolutely no sense of restraint when it comes to hardware. If you listen to me, you'll end up with a 10 petaflop IBM super running in your back garden. Disregard that, as you were! Regards -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq