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

[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]

Originally Posted by Kevris [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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]

Originally Posted by iruinedyourday [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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]

Originally Posted by Pringles [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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]

Originally Posted by Kevris [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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]

Originally Posted by Pringles [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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]

Originally Posted by Proven Guilty [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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