Why a server?

A server provides services to your desktop machine. Usually its purpose is to off-load other computers, to centralize services and configuration, to share services. The servers described here are integrated as NAS1 servers

  • Typical services that run from a server
  • file server: provides centralized storage space and/or backup
  • music server: DAAP server (iTunes)
  • http, ftp server: provide web sites and web space, usually to the outside world
  • mail server
  • firewall, web acceleration: regulate in and out-going traffic, cache internet content
  • time server (ntp): provides accurate time to clients
  • internet phone: Asterisk - as home PBX
  • repository server: cvs or svn services, where all versions of controlled files are managed
  • authentication server: provide authentication through keys and passwords

Now, why would you need a server?

Lets say you are a little family with 3 computers, 2 laptops and 1 tower. You all have photos, music, cell phone data, addressbooks, documents and videos of your own on your personal machine (and maybe you want to keep it that way, then you don't not need a file server). If you care about your data you have three backups to tend to, you can't share readily photos, music etc. because you have to ask the other, switch on the computer, you have 3 times the same stuff and so on. In most cases at least some of you are slack with backups, and over the years you loose data here and there, and a lot of it hurts and costs insane amounts of time to recover.

If you had a server like the 'many purpose server' below you could store all your common data on that machine and mount it as a network drive. Then you have 1 backup to care for, the data is always ready (because of the low power device that is on-line all the time), sharing is no problem, you buy a new laptop or re-install your operating system without a blink, since as soon as you've mounted the server you're set.

A similar scenario can be drawn for a bureau or small business with a few employees. The difference might be that your data transfer rate should be higher, you want to become your own web hoster, accelerate web access with a squid server, have an additional firewall etc.

Larger work groups or high performance data shuffling can't use the poor man's 'many purpose server', they need a normal desktop, tower or server rack configured as a server: a business server.

Many purpose servers

This is about an amazing little NSLUG2 device that will add a central disk space to your home or office network. I set it up with a 1GB USB stick from which the OS is running. In order to work a separate disk is required (see image) that can be tailored to your needs. The device goes to sleep if not used and saves energy. My setup has all services pre-configured, it's a flick to enable them. It has an ethernet RJ45 connection and 2 USB 2.0 ports whereof one is used up by the attached disk. Backups can be done over the second USB connection of over the network.

The performance is moderate (~4MB/s rw mode), but good enough for video streaming. A digital photo will be transferred in about 1 second making slideshows possible. What you need is a good network, best is 100 Mb/s ethernet. A 54Mb/s Wlan will not slow down performance but its bandwidth will be fully used up. As a web server it will be faster than your upload rate.

NSLU22 x 13cm x 2,1cm x 9cm, 160 gr, 7€ + 74€ + 99€ (500GB 04/2008), power < 20W. Ready-to-run configured I'll sell it for 230€.
 

Business server

A business server needs more performance and responsitivity then the NSLUG2, which can be achieved with 'normal' desktop machines. A Pentium 4 computer with a Giganet network will get your files at 30 MB/s (that is native speed as if the server disk would be in your computer). So you can work with a NAS as if everything was in your computer.

If you need even higher performance (~100 MB/s) the configuration has to be changed somewhat. Then your workstation needs to be set-up as a RAID device for fast local performance.

This NAS server will be used as backup and LAN2 share - a rsync script will synchronize at a preset interval (can be minutes) all workstations to the NAS. File sharing will then be up to date after this synchronization interval.

Please contact me for a detailed offer.

1 NAS = Network Attached Device.
2 LAN = Local Area Network = Ethernet.