Home Server Help

Conor108

I have an old Packard-Bell PC. Its an 800Mhz Pentium 3, 96MB Ram and a massive 8 gig HDD.

It's running Windows 98 (Rarely used, kept in attic) and I'm thinking I should put it to use after reading some Lifehacker articles.

Its has an Ethernet network card so I think if I put some decent storage in it (500GB-1TB) it could act as a home media server? I'd have to upgrade some components though wouldn't I? Ram? or Mobo for a RAID array?

Theres another 2 PCs and a PS3 (running Yellow Dog Linux) so If I had them networked via Ethernet over Power lines, Movies, Music etc. could be streamed around the house from this server yes? I'd probably put LinuxMCE on the server but I'm not sure about the OS so suggestions would be great.

I'd also let the server be a Hamachi server for VPN. And also a shared iTunes server.

Any thoughts/suggestions on that? I' quite unsure about servers so I may be overtaxing it a bit.

Thanks:)

Wolff

I have a 1ghz machine running something like that with a 3 hardisks in there and it runs fine

ZENER

Hi, sounds like a good plan. The PC sounds too old to support 500GB or 1TB drives though. A barebones machine with something more modern would only cost about 200 quid, remember you don't need a monitor or fancy graphics or sound card nor a keyboard or mouse.

The PS3 wont see an iTunes server but it does see anything running MediaTomb or DLNA compliant NAS such as FreeNAS. I currently have this running with an Athlon 1.6GHz, 512MB, 2x320GB IDE, 1GB LAN. It's the way to go really.

ZEN

the_syco

If using anything bigger than a 137GB drive with 98, look up 137GB LBA... or something. Off-hand I don't know if 98 is effected (never had more than a 50GB drive at the time), but 2000 was.

spartacus93

the_syco wrote: »

If using anything bigger than a 137GB drive with 98, look up 137GB LBA... or something. Off-hand I don't know if 98 is effected (never had more than a 50GB drive at the time), but 2000 was.

Isn't it a BIOS limitation rather than an OS limitation... Well it is a BIOS limitation i'm just not sure is it an issue with Windows 98 aswell.

Anyway, a server's a great idea. Everything in one place. Easy to manage and update. In the process of making one myself, just have to lay cat 6 cables all around the house.

If you go with the computer you have it should be fine, assuming you get the hard drives sorted, for a basic file server. You'll need more RAM for sure, it's probably SD, so €50 for 512Mb. As for hard drive's, it's hard to say no to a terabyte at this price http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=343055

The easiest way is to keep your current system, add more memory and storage. Set up basic network shares and take it from there.

Do you have wired networking in the house or will you be using wi-fi?

You might be better off biting the bullet and building a new system. This can be done very cheaply and will give you faster access speeds and much greater options now and in the future. Does Windows Home Server interest you?

It's a very interesting project. My own plan is a new windows home server machine with a couple of extenders run off a wired network. Probably get a couple of terabyte HD's and load on all my DVDs, videos, pictures, music etc. Media Centre makes for a very impressive setup once it's all working.

SouperComputer

LinuxMCE wont run well on that setup. Are you planning to use it as a media client and display the content? If this is the case, forget its only barely up to the job of displaying video.

If not, and you just plan on it being a media/file server, all you need is more RAM (256MB min), a copy of clarkconnect community edition and a SATA PCI card.

Generally speaking, Linux will probe the HD controller rather than the motherboard's BIOS for the HD size, so the limitation generally is not an issue. I have had multiple 500GB drives running a kernel-RAID setup on an old P3 500Mhz without any addressing issues. 138LBA only applied to windows 2000 Pre SP2 IIRC, in any case it a simple reg key change to fix.

Be very careful with the RAM, not al SD is created equal. More recently produced RAM is generally a higher density which means either your computer will only "see" half of it, or it will refuse to boot. 16Mb (megabit, im referring to density, not size) modules are generally fine. 32Mb are almost certain to fail. 8Mb is most compaible but of course, 512MB on one stick with this low denisty is a tall order.

OS wise, we really need to talk more about what your sources are, how you want to access the media Etc. Forget wireless, I would strongly urge you to use CAT5E/6 if you can, failing this the homeplug setup you mentioned will suffice.

mjsmyth

I have a P3 1Ghz with 384mb ram. It has 3 external USB drives attached (110, 320 & 500GB). Media folders are all shared out using standard windows file sharing for access on laptops and xbmc. TVersity is used to act as a Media Server so the PS3 has access to the same folders. Transcoding is disabled in TVersity.

The speed of the PC doesn't really matter too much when all you want to do is share out folders. More important will be the network card (possibly might only be 10 MBIT card) and speed of HD's.

I don't think TVersity runs on 98, its not meant to run on W2k either, so it may be worth a try.

To sum up, try it, you never know, it might work. If it doesn't well it won't have cost you anything apart from your time.

mj