My Home Server: Introduction & Progress Report
For quite some time now I have been working on ideas for a home server I want to build with the aim of allowing me to use my laptop around the house without loosing half the functions I need.
Today I was messing around and remembered about this project when I came across the computer I had planned to use for this and wondered what it was that had caused me to abandon my plan months ago. It turned out that while it was super quiet (quieter than my external HDD) there was a faint but noticeable high pitched whine coming from inside. One of the things that made this computer so quiet was that it only had one fan, on the PSU, (Even the CPU was passively cooled) and after some investigation, I narrowed the whine to be coming from this fan. After some messing around opening up the PSU and such I had swapped the fan for a newer, quieter one and having put the whole thing back together I honestly can’t tell if this thing is on and will be easily able to get to sleep at night.
The aim of this project was pretty simple when it started: To be able to use my laptop around the house with only need to plug the power cable in and with no loss of functionality.
This wasn’t going to be so easy as my laptop currently has a, nearing full, seven port USB hub and worse still, I don’t yet have a wireless network.
When finished my server should have all of the following features:
Wireless access point – Using an Atheros wireless card in AP mode and the Madwifi drivers.
File server – Courtesy of a 500GB hard drive
Bittorrent client – Probably Deluge or similar
Music streaming server – Using Pulseaudio streaming client
Backup server – To make it easier to keep all my data safe
Print server – I will soon have two printers (Colour inkjet and B&W Laser) and will use turbo print
Having now got the basic unit up and running I am looking to get parts to add the various extra features. These include:
1xSATAII, 1xeSATAII, 1xIDE, 4xUSB 2.0 all in one card (I only have four PCI slots so multifunction is good and all the other usb ports are 1.0/1.1).
Network card – Got them lying about all over the place.
500GB HDD – My old 250 is getting pretty full..
Sound card – Might use a spare internal card or the USB box I’m using now.
And last but not least, The Atheros wireless card.
