[nylug-talk] Slim home server for samba and subversion (and possibly IMAP)

[Michael Werneke]

On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 9:15 AM, Alexander L. Belikoff
<alexander at belikoff.net> wrote:
>
>
>  The problem is, there is a world of difference between something that
>  works well and something that is merely a proof of concept. In this
>  case, I do need something that does work well - I cannot afford having a
>  home server that is either flaky or crawling when serving the files (I
>  am not going to stream video from it, but, as I said, I'd like my iPod
>  syncs to stay within a 5-7 minute range). Therefore, I'd really
>  appreciate some info from people who have experience using such a setup
>  for practical real-life purposes. Moreover, any pointers to an
>  alternative device/setup would be also highly appreciated.
>

I 'inherited' an old PII 350MHz server that happened to have a RAID
card in it. I found 36.4GB scsi drives to put in it and yanked a GigE
card out of my dead workstation. I set the drives up in RAID 10 for
maximum read/write speed and almost bombproof redundancy. Granted,
it's only about 109GB of storage, but I only have a 30GB iPod. The
server runs ubuntu and acts as a SMB server for my Windows laptop. The
syncs are never more than 90 - 120 seconds to sync almost the full
27GB that the iPod holds. The bottleneck ends up being the ethernet
card on the laptop and the USB cable that goes to the iPod.

Serving files isn't all that processor intensive, so the PII does just
fine. It's got 1GB of RAM and acts as a low-traffic web/mail/dns
server as well; each of which runs in its own VMware instance.

I fear I may have digressed more than I intended or that my post isn't
even remotely germain, but I'm hitting 'Send' anyways. Good luck.

-Mike