Home Server Ideas (..it's goint to get Nerdy in here...)

[Kevris]

So I've just pulled the trigger on pretty decent Supermicro server from EBay, 2x L5520 CPU's, 40GB RAM, decent LSI Raid controller, 12 drive bays. This will be upgrading my current (super old) Opteron 1214/8GB server. I'll have 2x 250GB 7.2k SATA drives mirrored with the server's onboard controller for my OS and 8x 1TB 7.2k SATA drives for data driven by the LSI controller, set in RAID-5 with an online spare.

As it stands I have a nice AD domain, roaming profiles, redirected folders. I've been using the old server as a data vault, media server, Minecraft server, WSUS server, WDS server and test platform for me to play around with new tech before I implement it at my office.

As I'm going from 2 cores/2 threads and 8GB of RAM to 8 cores/16 threads and 40GB RAM I'm going to have a TON more horsepower to play around with.

The backbone in the house is 1GB on some crappy unmanaged switches (I'll swap that for better ones when I find some on the cheap). The endpoints are used for gaming, media streaming, normal home computing stuff.

Give me some ideas to suck up some of this extra horsepower, my fellow nerds!

[Samoht]

set in RAID-5 with an online spare.

Is that controller capable of RAID-6? No spare required.

[Kevris]

Is that controller capable of RAID-6? No spare required.

It is, but I don't know that I want the performance hit from the second parity write.

[Samoht]

It is, but I don't know that I want the performance hit from the second parity write.

Try benchmarking some data writes and let me know if it's worth the added redundancy over the hot spare.

[Kevris]

Try benchmarking some data writes and let me know if it's worth the added redundancy over the hot spare.

Yeah fair enough. The disks are 2ish years old so do I really care about a little more write speed? Not enough to risk it.

So what about uses. Any ideas?

[SamwiseRed]

I have no idea. I am guessing you can rent/sale server space though?

[Kevris]

I have no idea. I am guessing you can rent/sale server space though?

Nah, I'm not paying an extra $600 a month for "business class" internet that's the same speed as what I have now only with a public IP address from a different range.

[Laugher]

Make an eq server ofc :p

[Corpsed]

Mine bitcoins

[Kevris]

Make an eq server ofc :p

If I wanted to run around on a server with no population, I'd play red.


ZZZZZINNNNG!

[MEGANS LAW]

stay off red bro, or we'll murder u

[Pringles]

Id slap ESX 6 on it, vsphere vapp, a few linux VMs for whatever i needed, and a few windows VMs for an EQ stack to screw around with. All VMs managed via salt.

This is what im doing for my current project, when I have spare time, on a beefy desktop i have under my desk. I really hate hosting anything on windows though, and it really saps my motivation to work on it.

[iruinedyourday]

So what about uses. Any ideas?

can u start hosting teams99 or recycle99 on it RIGHT NOW?

[iruinedyourday]

make a vanilla only eq server for p99

can this thing do that stuff? im just throwing this stuff at you for fun mostly

but a vanilla only server would be rad

[Kevris]

make a vanilla only eq server for p99

can this thing do that stuff? im just throwing this stuff at you for fun mostly

but a vanilla only server would be rad

If I remember right the hardware '99 runs off of is some pretty normal proliant or power edge boxes, and only a couple of them. It's not like they have a big ass UCS blade system that they shelled out 150k for.

I would imagine the big challenge for an emulator isn't the server hardware, but a high bandwidth low latency internet connection.

The other big problem would be: I'm not going to pay for business-class internet to my house.

The minecraft server I run is for me and a few friends to dick around on; if my public IP address changes I track it down and give it to them to update their client's with.

[Kevris]

Id slap ESX 6 on it, vsphere vapp, a few linux VMs for whatever i needed, and a few windows VMs for an EQ stack to screw around with. All VMs managed via salt.

This is what im doing for my current project, when I have spare time, on a beefy desktop i have under my desk. I really hate hosting anything on windows though, and it really saps my motivation to work on it.

Yeah, kinda what I've been doing with the old box, but replace the VMware bits with Hyper-V. Microsoft4lyfe.

[iruinedyourday]

If I remember right the hardware '99 runs off of is some pretty normal proliant or power edge boxes, and only a couple of them. It's not like they have a big ass UCS blade system that they shelled out 150k for.

I would imagine the big challenge for an emulator isn't the server hardware, but a high bandwidth low latency internet connection.

The other big problem would be: I'm not going to pay for business-class internet to my house.

The minecraft server I run is for me and a few friends to dick around on; if my public IP address changes I track it down and give it to them to update their client's with.

can u make a PVP warzone box, where we can /copy our characters and do pvp skirmishes for fun?

[Proven Guilty]

Id slap ESX 6 on it, vsphere vapp, a few linux VMs for whatever i needed, and a few windows VMs for an EQ stack to screw around with. All VMs managed via salt.

This is what im doing for my current project, when I have spare time, on a beefy desktop i have under my desk. I really hate hosting anything on windows though, and it really saps my motivation to work on it.

Pretty much this. Also, I'd encourage you to check out FreeBSD. Hyper-V 2012 R2 core edition is pretty good if you're sharp in powershell and being OS agnostic myself, I'd have to agree that there is nothing better than Active directory.

If you're using configuration management at home for practice, Salt or Chef are both excellent. You can also make a single box Hyper-V and another box VMWare to keep yourself experienced in both areas. They both work fundamentally the same and it was a fun challenge creating business continuity scenarios between the two hypervisors using configuration management to quickly replaced failed hosts (as you won't be using licensed features to allow fault tolerance/active failover).

Lastly, business class internet isn't nearly that expensive in my area and it may be worth looking into for yours. Cox is just like Comcast here in Arizona and a 50/5 connection with a single static IP is around $200/mo. The support is much, much better (Think tierIII guys, not call center guys) and the perks of same day repair for outages and prioritized routes makes a big difference for common last mile problems I never see anymore.

I used to have quite a few high end servers at home, but I've since moved everything out to private colo at a real datacenter. I have similar hardware but upgraded the CPUs to X5660s (6 core, dual CPU per motherboard, supported hyperthreading). I have the Dell C6100 blades with 4 nodes in a 2U with the same 12-bay front 3.5" drives but it allows flexibility with how you configure the disks as they don't have to be evenly distributed if you don't want them to be (one host can be a raid1 and the other can be a 10-disk raid-10 for example).

In any event, I'd recommend SSDs for your boot drives, setup a PXE image host and allow your AD server to serve pxe clients DHCP addresses. Get a vagrant installation running for quick build up/tear down of virtual machines. Check out some SDN (software defined networking) such as Vyatta (formerly open, now an official Brocade product), and setup your own storage for your media. (thinking plex, usenet auto fetcher like sabnzbd).

Brain dump of things I used to do in my home office tech closet:
Plex
Sabnzbd
OpenVPN Server/Client Mesh (to help family out of state with remote VNC)
File server (CIFS and NFS)
Hypervisors of different flavors (2 servers limits you to VMWare and/or Hyper-V, but I'd also get familiar with KVM as its very cross platform and/or CoreOS. SmartOS if you enjoy FreeBSD and Joyent now made it open source!)
Enterprise networking (Cheap cisco, Brocade/Foundry, Juniper can be had off craigslist/ebay).
TFTP server for devices such as diskless workstations, rasberry Pi nodes, VoIP phone configurations, etc
802.1q vlans, experiment with tagged and untagged interfaces if you don't already have experience with it

[Kevris]

If you're using configuration management at home for practice, Salt or Chef are both excellent. You can also make a single box Hyper-V and another box VMWare to keep yourself experienced in both areas. They both work fundamentally the same and it was a fun challenge creating business continuity scenarios between the two hypervisors using configuration management to quickly replaced failed hosts (as you won't be using licensed features to allow fault tolerance/active failover).



That is actually a great idea; I think I'll reload the current box with VMware after I create/promote my new box as PDC. I know in essence nothing of VMware as all I've ever done has been Hyper-V. Not a problem in the current job, but you never know...

For my PXE boot solution I'm using WDS to supply images for not only my VM's but my physical boxes as well. When my girlfriend riddles her PC with adware, I just blow it out and redeploy. Works like a charm and I don't have to go through the hassle of cleaning that crap off. With the images for 2012r2, win7/8 and all the drivers already sitting in WDS it's actually faster to reload than "clean."

I'm know enough about vlans to be dangerous; at the office I have my phones segmented off from the rest of my network and my cluster talks to itself over its own vlan on the virtual switch. Maybe it's time to buy some better switches and do it at home as well...

For media I'm just using the extra download they released for 2012r2. It's a DLNA server that lets me stream to my consoles. What is PLEX? Does it have a "pretty" interface? Right now it's kind of like navigating a Windows folder structure to launch a movie. Functional, but not ideal I guess.

[Swish]

this thread needs a shower and the pizza boxes clearing away

[Laugher]

make a vanilla only eq server for p99

can this thing do that stuff? im just throwing this stuff at you for fun mostly

but a vanilla only server would be rad

srsly wanted to do this with mac client, could make it ultra classic 640x480 mini box complete with ui and all

[maskedmelon]

Make an eq server ofc :p

This is what I expected this thread to be about. I am disappointed and leaving now...

[B4EQWASCOOL]

If I wanted to run around on a server with no population, I'd play red.


ZZZZZINNNNG!

If you weren't a blue coward, you'd play red.