[Discuss] Home server

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Rohan Joshi <rohan2jos at gmail.com> queried:
> I was thinking of making a home server that will backup my photos and
> documents, preferably one that is scheduled.
>
> Is there any particular distribution that is better than Ubuntu for this
> purpose.

Wow, this has already been analyzed to death...amazing number of replies. 
Building a home server really doesn't require much thought regarding the
distro: I like Ubuntu or OpenSUSE but if you prefer something else, just about
any distro will do. You're relying on core Linux (I'm presuming Linux because
you posted to BLU) kernel capabilities for most of this, plus a handful of
basic packages available on any distro.  The technologies I use take the idea
of a "home server" and go well beyond.  Here's some of what I have set up:

* LVM - create a pool of your physical media, and allocate filesystems out of
this pool; then when you run out of storage on any volume, you have the choice
of cleaning up stale stuff or adding more space.

* Software RAID - makes it easy to add more hard drives when you need them, or
to swap out failed drives.  I prefer software RAID because with modern CPUs
(or even older ones like yours) you don't take a performance hit and you can
easily set up monitoring so it emails you if a drive fails.

* Nagios - for monitoring everything

* LUKS encryption - to keep the thieves out

* Samba - for sharing with Windows and OS X

* GlusterFS - for clustering 2 or more servers (this one is hard to learn and
only works well for volumes with small numbers of files)

* CrashPlan - for backups

* rsnapshot - secondary tool for backups (I always back things up two
different ways so one mistake or misconfiguration can't wipe out the backups)

* UPS - keep everything on battery

* Raspberry Pi - a bastion-host firewall so the home servers aren't directly
mapped to external IPs but I can still ssh in if I need to.

* haproxy - load-balancing for software packages that can use more than one
server

* virtualbox and LXC - software virtualization / containerization to keep apps
away from the fileservers (so I can upgrade software more easily, and so
intruders have a harder time compromising things)

I think the bare-minimum essentials are: the UPS, CrashPlan, LVM, and Samba. 
The rest are bells-and-whistles.

-rich