set up my own server

Where’s the planning? There will be planning! Tomorrow!

• Automatic backup! Servers fail and I’m lazy.

• Power saving is a nice feature for something that is running 24/7 but isn’t active all the time. It isn’t clear how to accomplish this.

• Applications crash and data gets corrupted. A script could perhaps handle these events…

• A watchdog could reset the server if it locks up.

• Fans and voltages may come to behave oddly. In such a case, the server should promptly power off.

This far I’ve set up an old computer with a new quiet power supply and I’m done with the urgent matters. In fact, only “neat” things remain. The computer has even been dust-proofed with an air filter, which I think is a nice feature.

The server-to-be has smoothly been running OpenBSD and an application on and off since July. There is more to be done to configure the operating system, but I’ll take it step by step.

I’m basically trying to do everything with this computer. I learned that I can kinda do everything with one computer so I’m going to try and squeeze every possible thing I can onto this one computer and see how that works. So far what I’m trying is dedicated FTP over FileZilla, Run a Website that I’m going to design, Counter-Strike Source Server, Ventrilo Server, Personal Blog and Anything else I can possibly think of. I know I’m going to waste all of my bandwidth with useless things but it’s a learning experience. I just hope that Comcast doesn’t shut down my internet service. I know they don’t look too kindly on people running servers at home. From a bit of research I learned that they don’t (or didn’t used to atleast) Block port 80 so I can run a website and blog. Tomorrow I am probably going to start designing the website. I’ve never done it before so it should be interesting. I’m trying to locate some tutorial videos covering the basics to advanced on dreamweaver. Anyways, things are moving along well.

I recently built a new computer and was going to give my computer that I had to my parents. My parents computer case only fits mini atx motherboards so I don’t have anywhere to put it and so I could buy them a computer case or I could make it a server… They hardly ever use the computer anyways because they usually use the laptop so I figured might aswell keep it for myself :).Right now it’s sitting hooked up in my room on my tech station that I made out of a shoe box. Its kinda old but now I just need to figure out what to do with it. The easy thing to do would be use windows home server and use it as a backup computer and hopefully as a media center storage computer so my parents can stream movies through the home network, but what do I learn if I do that? Plus I would have to teach them to use the network and that would take till the end of summer… I think I am going to try to go either windows vista or linux instead of home server. I think it’s been about 5 months since I installed my windows vista on this computer so I might be able to install it on the old computer now… I don’t play many computer games anymore so setting it up as a counterstrike server wouldn’t really do me any good. Plus it’s in my room and I have huge 120×38 110cfm fans attached to the tech station for benchmarking and it is really loud…

I will research the possibilities and hope that I can figure out by the end of the weekend.

Specs of old computer to be server
Board : K8n Neo
Ram : 2Gb Corsair
proc : amd 64 3200+
Hard driv: 320gb (need more room for movie/music storage server)
Vid card : BFG 6800 Ultra

The web say it’s not worth doing but they are outdated. Keeping up a server is a peace of cake. My server needs updating about once every 6 months and that’s about 30 mins work.

I’ve forgotten what you told me about an easy way to set up a server (not connected to the Internet).