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Setting up a linux server is a piece of cake these days. Most linux distros have live CDs that allow you to get linux installed quickly and easily in a user friendly graphical environment. There are NAS devices all about that offer a lot of "features", but I haven't seen one that offered anything I couldn't set up myself by using a Linux.I ended up getting a beefier system than expected because systems are so cheap these days. I have a quad-core 64 bit processor, 8 gigs of ram, and 5 500 gigabyte disks set up on a very fast RAID array. That's more disk space than any NAS device I saw configured retail and a whole heck of a lot more power. The question quickly became - what else can I use it for?
The first thing that came to mind was a VMWare Server. I do a lot of developing for machines that are not set up exactly the way I have my network set up at home. VMWare Server gives me the ability to set up virtual machines with any operating system I'm interested in and to turn those machines on and run software on them whenever I want. I have dedicated virtual machines set up for VPN access to different sites, I have a few windows installations, several different flavors of linux, and even a solaris machine set up. I can easily interact with the machines, and when I'm connected via the VPN, I still have access to my local network. Because the virtual machines are running on a separate dedicated server they run smoothly - even when multiple virtual machines are running.
I also have an oracle installation running on the server. It's nice to have access to it - for both development and for managing my own personal databases. I also have mysql installed to help with my web development tasks.
Then there's source control. I now have a versioning system running on this server that allows me to keep track of my software development efficiently and inspect and review the changes that I made over time.
I also have monitoring set up using Nagios. It keeps track of my web servers, my mail servers, and my local network to ensure that everything is running smoothly and it will alert me when anything goes down.
I also have a backup system set up. I make backups of my web server files 5 times a day and soon I hope to have backups set up for my local machines as well. I can easily restore just a few files or just about everything from a given point and time - which is a pretty big step for me.
I can run a DNS cacheing system to improve the response time of my local machines - and to reduce my reliance on comcast / verizon DNS servers to get to the web.
I can migrate my home automation tasks to the linux server - turning lights on and off etc.
And then there's the proxy server. I don't know that I'm completely sold on the concept, but it does filter out bad sites and improves performance on web sites by caching certain files locally rather than retransmitting requests for common resources over the web. There are some things I don't like about the proxy server and filtering, but I can talk about those another time.
I replaced my external drives with network storage so my wiring is a lot cleaner and I get the added benefit of speed improvements and redundant storage.
There are a lot of other things you can do with a linux server. The possibilities are endless - from home media serving to running a local application server and everywhere in between.
Talk About What you can do with a Linux Server at Home
