Home Server

[stephen_87]

I am new here so dont be to harsh on me but I looked for something similer to this and found nothing.

Here is what I want to do: I want to make a server at my house, the purpose of this server is to house 5 1TB HDD so that my family can store and back up thier movies, music, pictures, and what not. Now I have the server built (for the most part) and I want to know if it is possable to to do the following with it before I kick her into action.

1st being if I can set a password for each individual hard drive so that each person can have there own private section so noone else can mess with there stuff(also if it can be done erect a firewall between hdd so if one gets infected it wont spread, but I guess if it wants to its gonna spread since they are hooked up together.).

2nd being if it is possiable to have a 6th harddrive setup so that if lets say later on down the road they make a 2TB hdd and one of my family members wants that hdd all I have to do is back up their current hdd to the 6th hdd and put in the new hdd and run the backup to copy everything to the new hdd.

Also I plan on using ubuntu to cut cost and to run the server. Also If you know how to do it using a windows server OS (preferably) let me know and I will buy it.

if some one can point me in the right direction so that I can get started on this that would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Proximon]

Since you are planning to use Ubuntu you should ask these questions in an Ubuntu forum.

The number of hard drives you can have is dependent on the motherboard you have. If it supports 6 SATA drives then you are set.

 

[stephen_87]

I should have added that if you know how to set it up on xp profesional or if windows NT or some other windows server OS would be my best bet then by all means tell me how I have looked for an answer all over the internet but to no avail.

personally I have never used ubuntu(I just asked thinking someone might have already done it) but I would probably just wind up buying windows NT or another windows server OS, just out of comfort.

 

[Proximon]

As long as you set up separate user accounts in XP or Vista you can control what hard drives those accounts have access to.

Setting passwords on drives would not work because people would neglect to log off the drive. Setting user file sharing access would be best.

You just have to disable simple file sharing as the administrator, then assign the drive to the user.

 

[TeraMedia]

If you're going to have 5 TB of storage on this thing, you need to have a backup and availability plan. If a drive dies, the user of that drive probably doesn't want to lose everything, and probably doesn't want to wait for you to restore it from 110 backup DVDs. You might even go so far as to have a second home server as a backup - or at least a NAS or something similar.

Your users will probably want to share files; one user gets read/write, and the rest get read-only for each share.

In XP etc. you can use disk quotas to control available space per user, rather than using a defined disk.

So... you might want to consider Windows Home Server. MSFT was running a promo recently for a 120 day free trial. The OEM version costs ~$120 or so on newegg, so it isn't that expensive. It allows for disk quotas. It automatically backs up your networked computers. It can span multiple disks, with varying levels of redundancy (for better availability) and it doesn't have to rely on RAID to do so (for better portability and easier administration). It even allows for you to add more space by plugging in another drive (e.g. your 2 TB drive example), without having to map anything. It allows for access control on a per-user basis to individual folders, which should meet your file-access requirements.

I've been considering WHS myself, because it honestly doesn't seem to be much more expensive than a NAS, and I like the backup features. I don't like the fact that it doesn't support tuners and DVR features, but I can put that into a TV server instead and simply archive my shows on WHS.

If you do this, do yourself a favor and do the following:
1) Define a backup strategy for your data, if you don't already have one. At that data volume, this must be in a separate physical location.
2) Define a sharing and privacy strategy so that you can share some things (e.g. music and videos between family members), but keep other things protected (e.g. don't let Junior alter your favorites playlist) and/or private (e.g. don't let Junior see your other videos).
3) Purchase and employ an UPS with sufficient battery time to safely shut down the system, and test the combination to ensure that it works, and that it works automatically. Don't forget to protect your server from voltage spikes on anything that plugs into it, including monitor (UPS that), ethernet (surge-protect that), etc. A lightning strike on a phone line can kill a computer connected to that phone line.
4) Define a redundancy / availability strategy. Anything you need readily accessible should be on redundant online storage so that you don't waste time restoring it. Anything that you wouldn't need right away (e.g. that other video collection we talked about) can be in offline backup storage, so that you can get it back but it simply takes longer to do so.

 

[stephen_87]

geez...I did not even think about a backup strategy, thanks for reminding me, but now that I have looked into that whole disk quota thing I think what is gonna happen is that I am gonna have four 1TB HDD (2 are going to hold the data and the other two are going to act as mirrors) and one 80GB HDD (use it to run the OS)

but having mirrors, lets say that one harddrive fails would I be able to replace it with a larger harddrive and copy everything from the mirror over and still have the extra space (I only ask because I have been told that when you restore from the mirror to a bigger hard drive it will only show that you have only the space of the smaller drive)