Recommendations for Home/Office Server?

[RedJenn]

Somewhat specialized request, I have a general sense of what I want, just am not up to date with the current hardware as I'd like, maybe someone here can help?

1. What YOUR PC will be used for. That means what types of tasks you'll be performing. In terms of priority

A. File server/NAS/Backup with encryption

B. Light server tasks (Test/Development web/db server, possibly email, version control, or other applications with web front end, never more than a handful of users)

C. Virtualization testing (more likely temporary instances that won't use a lot of resources)

I am planning to run FreeBSD or Linux, so might be some hardware compatibility concerns. Also would want AES and to a lesser extent virtualization features of the CPU. At least 4 HDD connections, at least 3 SATA 6gb. USB 3 and/or eSATA would be nice, but not completely necessary. I am planning on using 3 3TB drives in the main storage array (non-hw RAID) with a seperate hdd for OS/local storage.

Would also like all of this to fit in a small, ITX size ideally, with relatively low power requirements (will be running all day).

The HP Microserver (http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/e...18-4237917-4248009-5336618-5336619.html?dnr=1)

looks close to what I was looking for, but need a better CPU, more memory, and don't need to pay for the HDD that comes with it.

2. What YOUR budget is. A price range is acceptable as long as it's not more than a 20% spread $750-900 (including the 3 3TB drives I mentioned, not including UPS, but recommendations on a UPS also welcome) If this isn't realistic, a sense of what is realistic would be appeciated.

3. What country YOU will be buying YOUR parts from.
USA

4. IF you're buying parts OUTSIDE the US, please post a link to the vendor you'll be buying from. We can't be expected to scour the internet on your behalf, chasing down deals in your specific country... Again, help us, help YOU.

5. IF YOU have a brand preference. That means, are you an Intel-Fanboy, AMD-Fanboy, ATI-Fanboy, nVidia-Fanboy, Seagate-Fanboy, WD-Fanboy, etc.

Generally prefer Intel cpu just out of familiarity, willing to branch out if it means significant savings.

6. If YOU intend on using any of YOUR current parts, and if so, what those parts are.

I have a 3.5" 150gb and 2.5" 250gb hdd sitting around that could be used, for the os and local storage. Also have a retired triple-channel 6GB ram kit that would be nice to get use out of, but not sure it's practical.

7. IF YOU plan on overclocking or run the system at default speeds.

Default, stability is important.

8. What resolution, not monitor size, will you be using? Not important, headless operation for the most part.

9. WHEN do you plan to build it? Note that it is usually not cost or time effective to choose your build more than a month before you actually plan to be using it.

In the next couple of weeks. If there's a major chipset revision coming in a month or two it would be good to know, but I really need a viable home office backup running soon.

X. Do you need to purchase any software to go with the system, such as Windows or Blu Ray playback software?

No.

Thanks in advance for any recommendations or advice!

 

[mfenn]

You don't need SATA 6Gb/s ports for mechanical drives. While they technically support it, the drive can barely physically exceed SATA 1.5Gb/s speeds, let alone SATA 3Gb/s speeds.

What are the exact specs of the RAM that you have available? It would be very useful indeed to be able to reuse that.

 

[RedJenn]

You don't need SATA 6Gb/s ports for mechanical drives. While they technically support it, the drive can barely physically exceed SATA 1.5Gb/s speeds, let alone SATA 3Gb/s speeds.

What are the exact specs of the RAM that you have available? It would be very useful indeed to be able to reuse that.

That's a good point about SATA speeds, hadn't really thought about it that way.

The ram is: 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Triple Channel Kit

Does that help? It was taken from an SO's gaming computer, wasn't sure it'd apply here, but it's just collecting dust at the moment, would love to make use of it.

 

[mfenn]

What model (or at least voltage) is the RAM? As long as it's 1.5V or lower, you can reuse it no problem. The fact that it's 2GB sticks is kind of awkward though, because that means you'll be maxing out at 4GB in an ITX board. Let's see how the budget shakes out.

Core i5 3470 $200
ASRock B75M-ITX $90
Corsair DDR3 1333 16GB $70
Toshiba 3TB 7200RPM x3 $405 - this pretty much dictates the budget for the rest of the parts
Corsair 430CX $27 AR
Fractal Design Node 304 $90
Total: $882 AR

I didn't end up using the RAM that you have, instead I put in a new 16GB kit. You could take that out and use 4GB of what you have, but I don't think it's worth the savings.

As for storage, I don't know that I'd actually use any of the drives that you have laying around. What I would probably do is this:

sda1,sdb1,sdc1 as a 3-drive RAID1 for /boot (only a few hundred MB)
sda2,sdb2,sdc2 as a 3-drive RAID5 for an LVM PV
LVM LV for / (30 GB or so is plenty)

Then you have the rest of the LVM VG free to allocate storage out of.

 

[RedJenn]

Thank you, that's pretty much exactly what I was looking for.

 

[mfenn]

Glad to help! Please let us know how it goes.

 

[RedJenn]

I have everything together, and I really like that case, never would have found it myself.

I was originally thinking about using two of the three disks as RAID1 with a third to be a backup, I've heard that's more secure than RAID5 (though I'd be getting a lot less space.) The data is important, but I plan on also having an external backup mechanism, so maybe the RAID1 option isn't needed, and I'd get better use of the drives? I've also considered FreeBSD so I can use ZFS, I just don't know it that well, and I understand the virtualization options are worse as a host OS. I also don't know exactly what the benefits I'd be getting are, which makes me think it's not worth the hassle.

Any thoughts on this?

 

[mfenn]

The thing about running FreeBSD is that the virtualization story (one of your requirements) is not nearly as good as it is for Linux. With FreeBSD, you're pretty much limited to VirtualBox, which works great on the desktop but is not really suited for servers.

RAID1 isn't inherently more or less secure than RAID5. You can run ZFS on Linux and use it's RAID capabilities if that's the way you want to go. Having an offsite (or at least out-of-box) backup target is essential no matter what RAID setup you go with.

If it were me, I'd probably do the LVM setup I described above and make backups to an external device.

 

[RedJenn]

Yes, that makes sense, the virtualization support in Linux is just much better, maybe I can just run a small FBSD vm if I feel like playing with it.

What I'm reading about the ZFS linux support makes me somewhat nervous, so I'm going with your original suggestion and just doing RAID5->dmcrypt->LVM. The Debian installer apparently really doesn't like booting off a raid array, so I'm using Gentoo now; somehow doing this all through the command line is more straightforward.

There have been a few things I had to do to get it to work that I didn't see documented, so I can post here when I'm done in case it ends up being useful to someone.

 

[mfenn]

Ack, Gentoo? Step away from the bomb please!

My original suggestion back in reply #4 was to use a 3-drive RAID1 for /boot and do everything else in LVM. The reason behind that is that RAID1 is readable by a program with no knowledge of RAID, meaning no configuration headaches. Having a separate /boot is always a good idea in general. Anyway, you should never have to boot the Debian installer off a RAID, that would boot from an ISO image or USB stick.

Also, I would have put dmcrypt after LVM so that you have the option to create encrypted and unencrypted logical volumes as the usage scenario dictates.

Anyway, good luck!