Use of a Home Server?

[silentmemories]

What's the point of having a server rack in an ordinary home? I remember seeing pictures of people's workspaces on the Internet with server racks in their homes.

 

[MustISO]

Some people use them for test labs for education or work. Some people run services like email servers or web servers. Backup servers are also popular.

 

[Ketchup]

Some people use them for test labs for education or work. Some people run services like email servers or web servers. Backup servers are also popular.

I would probably say this as well. My file/media "server" is really just a tower with a server OS, running server roles. I might have a rack server at the house but:

1. I don't have a good place but put one, and
2. I have been inside enough of them at work to satisfy my interest on the hardware side.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I have a server. It doesn't really do much, but:

NAS/Backups w/ Centralized Crashplan
PLEX
Minecraft
Local DNS / DNS Cache
Tinkering/Testing with Linux. (I learned how post to Twitter with a Python script, for instance.) I could do some of this on my main box with VirtualBox, but... meh.

I haven't been "using" it much lately - it just sits there and does its job.

Edit: I suppose I could make it a print server too...

 

[BonzaiDuck]

What's the point of having a server rack in an ordinary home? I remember seeing pictures of people's workspaces on the Internet with server racks in their homes.

First, I have a bias of a work-related home-office history (before retirement) and inclination to use older systems for this purpose as opposed to just selling them or donating to charity. One also accumulates perfectly serviceable HDDs from older systems. It became a habit to use one machine as just a file-server, even in a peer-to-peer arrangement and a workstation OS (like Win 2000 Wkstation, etc.) I later used Win 2000 Server and then Windows Home Server versions 1.0 and 2011 successively.

Now I have a household with two other users (and their computers) in addition to my own two workstations used to different purposes.

It has been a real lifesaver having a server that backs up every single workstation in the house every night. I was able to do two successive bare-metal restorations -- one of which arose from my own carelessness.

Frankly, I'd feel just plain naked if I only had a single workstation -- or worse -- needed to share it with everyone else in the house.

 

[ultimatebob]

I think that a lot of people here have media servers to store their Blu-Ray and DVD rips. Some of them have video collections that are more than 20 TB now.

I use my servers for a VMWare vSphere lab and have a Raspberry Pi for my always on web server.

 

[mfenn]

What's the point of having a server rack in an ordinary home? I remember seeing pictures of people's workspaces on the Internet with server racks in their homes.

Most people who have a home server, generally speaking, use it for media storage. That doesn't have to be a rackmount, and in fact is usually a prebuilt NAS device like one from Synology or QNAP.

As for people with enterprise rackmount gear, that's a much smaller subset. Generally they have it because their job (current or desired) has them using that sort of equipment and they want a home lab to learn with or just play around on for fun.

 

[poofyhairguy]

I think that a lot of people here have media servers to store their Blu-Ray and DVD rips. Some of them have video collections that are more than 20 TB now.

This for me