What a clever way that rack was - hanging like that. Love it and my head is spinning how I should do this with both my battlestation-PC, NAS, routers and everything.
Upgrading my home server
21–30 of 70 posts
Re: Upgrading my home server
#22For those wanting a quiet home server for cheap, go for a well-ventilated tower PC, best with passive CPU cooler and a quiet case and power supply fan. You can put that box in a bedroom and almost never see it/hear it. Rackmount server in home people so often brag about on the Internet is a very loud and impractical way to run network services from home, unless you have separate room for it.
I have my doubts over bedroom quiet if you have hard drives in it. Ssd unfortunately still too expensive for redundant home storage use.
Re: Upgrading my home server
#23For those wanting a quiet home server for cheap, go for a well-ventilated tower PC, best with passive CPU cooler and a quiet case and power supply fan. You can put that box in a bedroom and almost never see it/hear it. Rackmount server in home people so often brag about on the Internet is a very loud and impractical way to run network services from home, unless you have separate room for it.
For both cheap and easy, pick up a used ThinkPad. Comes witj built in console too, normally a feature only found in high end blade racks!
Re: Upgrading my home server
#24What is the best and cheapest way to make a home server available to the internet, using a standard "home use" ISP contract? Can you give it a domain name? How do you deal with the asymmetrical upload/download speeds of most home connections?
There are some free offerings available of dynamic DNS. IIRC DuiaDNS [1] is free.
In The Netherlands (a very tiny country though) Xs4all is one of the very few ISPs allowing home users to change the A/AAAA/PTR/MX records of their hostname/IP address (for both their DSL and FTTH offerings). You can get a subdomain or use your own domain, with reverse DNS. They've been doing that since forever. You can also get shell access. They're also a bit more expensive than the competition though.
Running your own server has one disadvantage (though it has gotten smaller these days): electricity costs and impact. I'm getting solar and Raspberry Pis and such are pretty marginal though. I suppose you should compare it with AWS and the like?
Re: Upgrading my home server
#25For those wanting a quiet home server for cheap, go for a well-ventilated tower PC, best with passive CPU cooler and a quiet case and power supply fan. You can put that box in a bedroom and almost never see it/hear it. Rackmount server in home people so often brag about on the Internet is a very loud and impractical way to run network services from home, unless you have separate room for it.
I have my doubts over bedroom quiet if you have hard drives in it. Ssd unfortunately still too expensive for redundant home storage use.
May be someone should be a sound proof case for a JBOD..
Disks suspended with cables? Box filled with sound absorption materials? Whatever it takes.
Or if that cost ~= cost of SSDs, just buy SSDs.
Me? I have a 12 TB SAS disk connected to the system with an easy to turn off switch so I power it up only when I need to backup something. Others times it stays unmounted and powered off. My whole digital footprint is only a TB....
Re: Upgrading my home server
#26For those wanting a quiet home server for cheap, go for a well-ventilated tower PC, best with passive CPU cooler and a quiet case and power supply fan. You can put that box in a bedroom and almost never see it/hear it. Rackmount server in home people so often brag about on the Internet is a very loud and impractical way to run network services from home, unless you have separate room for it.
I have my doubts over bedroom quiet if you have hard drives in it. Ssd unfortunately still too expensive for redundant home storage use.
Mine is in the kitchen for exactly that reason. No matter how quiet it is, any sort of constant noise like that of an hdd drives me nuts. But I fully agree normal desktop tower is the way to go. Enough space inside so it doesn't easily overheat and lots of room for expansion.
Using it for routing with DNS block list, media file server and off site backup.
One thing I can recommend after decades of fiddling around with home servers: If you don't need it for the high availability, don't use raid 1. Raid is not a backup. Use another drive, preferably larger, and run something like dirvish or Borg once a day or however often you see fit in your case.
Re: Upgrading my home server
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
You register a domain name, set it up on CloudFlare and use a script which checks if your IP changed and submits it to the CloudFlare REST API setting an A record: https://github.com/kissgyorgy/cloudflare-dyndns
I've used ddclient which has support for a lot more DNS services, including Cloudflare: https://github.com/ddclient/ddclient
I wrote the script because I did not wanted to use ddclient :D and it's terrible config syntax. Also, it corrupted the cache regularly for some reason.
Re: Upgrading my home server
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
cheapest way is to sign up with a dynamic DNS service like http://freedns.afraid.org/ - choose a subdomain you like. Then run an agent on your server to monitor when/if your public IP changes - it will send the new IP to the dynamic DNS. If you'd prefer a paid option that uses your own domain, then some providers like Digital Ocean expose DNS settings via API. Here's a google search to get you started: https://www.go…
CNAME'ing your own domain to a "dynamic DNS" provider is also an option.
Note that when using this approach, you shouldn't use the root domain; you can still use a subdomain with no issues though.
[0]: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/why-cant-a-domain-s-root-b... [1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cname-flattening-rfc...
Re: Upgrading my home server
#29For those wanting a quiet home server for cheap, go for a well-ventilated tower PC, best with passive CPU cooler and a quiet case and power supply fan. You can put that box in a bedroom and almost never see it/hear it. Rackmount server in home people so often brag about on the Internet is a very loud and impractical way to run network services from home, unless you have separate room for it.
Loudest component will usually be the drives, otherwise something else is to loud.
I don't know that I've ever seen a rackmount server where the fans weren't by far the loudest part. Granted, I haven't bought a new server from the last few years, but manufacturers seem to have very little desire to reduce fan noise, and without that it's unlikely they'll be quieter than even a rack full of drives.
Re: Upgrading my home server
#30For those wanting a quiet home server for cheap, go for a well-ventilated tower PC, best with passive CPU cooler and a quiet case and power supply fan. You can put that box in a bedroom and almost never see it/hear it. Rackmount server in home people so often brag about on the Internet is a very loud and impractical way to run network services from home, unless you have separate room for it.
> Rackmount server in home people so often brag about on the Internet is a very loud and impractical way to run network services from home, unless you have separate room for it.
I definitely wouldn't have my rackmount server in my bedroom, but instead I have it in a separate office/study room.
If you get decent fans (like Noctua) it's definitely not that loud, though the main problem is it's hard to find a cheap power supply that has decent (or replaceable) fans for a 2U rack. You can replace the fans on PSUs by cutting wires and soldering but that's always felt like a bad idea to me.