Linux Community Magazine

There are plenty of things that a home server can do. Probably the most popular applications is to function as a media center that serves videos in addition to music files. Many people would love to have movies and videos on demand that they have stored on their media server. Using the cost of storage dropping and the size of hard drives growing dramatically every year, it's becoming possible to store movies and music in high quality or high resolution on a hard drive. Even multiple HD movies could be stored easily on the hard disc drive today. With windows storage server 2008 r2 all of this will become easier for you do do.

There are additional ways to use this kind of server as well. Other great uses include file sharing, print server, web caching, proxy services and backups. In many cases, some or all of these features can be performed by a single server since the computing resources required are very low.

Requirements

The computing requirements for any home server is very low, even when it's going to be used as a media rackmount server. Generally, a CPU that is only 1 Ghz (quite slow by today's standards) and 256 MB of RAM should be sufficient. If the server will be used as a media server, attempt to have the biggest hard drive possible. For protection, it may be a good idea to buy a RAID protected storage system, but that will increase the cost of storage significantly.

When the server is running on the Linux operating-system instead of Windows, it's possible to slide by with very cheap and old hardware. That is why the Linux operating-system is very popular in many consumer computing devices for example routers.

Cost

One of the biggest benefits of building a home server is cost. Because the system does not need to be powerful, there's a lot of money to be stored in terms of a hardware investment. Many people have been able to utilize old pc or old notebook computer.

If your computer needs to be purchased, there is no need to purchase anything that is powerful. The least powerful and cheapest computer will probably work. The only place not to skimp is the hard drive if it will be a media server so that you can store movies and music. This may also turn into a wise decision to purchase an uninterruptible power source to ensure that power outages don't cause corrupted data within the server.

Security

A great application for any home server would be to function as a proxy server as well as linux virtual server. This means all internet browser traffic has to go through the server prior to going online. For moms and dads who wish to monitor their children's Internet activity, having a proxy server is a great thing.

Having a proxy server, it is possible to find out every single website a child is visiting. It's also possible to bar certain websites on an ad-hoc basis for example pornographic websites. With a proxy server, it will be much easier to catch children going to inappropriate websites early.