Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
mouse connected to the server. We have plenty of spares lying around,
but leaving those peripherals connected would make it difficult to tuck
the server away under Robert's desk as we planned.
Ubuntu Server
Ubuntu Server is free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech. It uses text-based
installation and maintenance, so it's unlikely to be suitable for anyone who's
not comfortable with command-line Linux. On the other hand, this is seri-
ous server software. It's stripped down to essentials, hence the absence of a
default GUI, and it's far faster than any of the other products we considered.
One wonderful feature of Ubuntu Server is its scripted setup of a LAMP
(Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) server. Setting up a LAMP server
manually may take a newbie hours (or an experienced Linux administra-
tor maybe 20 minutes). With Ubuntu Server, setting up a LAMP server is a
single menu option. Frankly, we think Ubuntu Server is a pretty good choice
for a small office server, provided you're already a moderately experienced
command-line-savvy Linux administrator (or have access to a Linux guru for
advice and assistance). But it really is overkill for most home servers, which
typically don't need to run web servers, mail servers, and so on.
A desktop Linux distribution
If your functional requirements are modest, don't rule out using a standard
desktop Linux distribution like Ubuntu on your server. In theory, there are
a lot of disadvantages to doing that, but in practice many of those objec-
tions disappear. For example, a desktop Linux distribution is usually slow-
er than a purpose-built server distribution. So what? We'll never notice
any tiny performance difference that may exist. A desktop distribution
may not support software RAID. Again, we don't care, because we plan to
run a JBOD on our home server. Desktop Linux distributions also have ad-
vantages relative to server distributions. The biggest advantage for most
people is that the desktop distro uses a familiar graphic interface. Setting
up a shared disk volume or printer is usually a matter of a few clicks. And
most desktop Linux distributions are set up to allow remote management
by default, or can easily be configured to do so.
A NAS package
There are several Linux- or FreeBSD-based
network-attached storage
(NAS)
distributions that are optimized to function as servers rather than work-
stations. They do nothing that any other Linux or FreeBSD distribution
can't do, but the advantage is that they're preconfigured to provide NAS
functions with a standard installation. You could spend hours or days get-
ting a desktop Linux or FreeBSD distribution set up to do the same things.
Among the most popular of these NAS packages are FreeNAS (
http://
freenas.org
)
, NASLite (
http://www.serverelements.com
), and TurnKey Linux
(
http://www.turnkeylinux.org
)
. All run on standard x86 systems and can
be configured and managed from a web browser running on a network
client. We also looked at NexentaStor (
http://www.nexenta.org
)
, which is
an industrial-strength NAS environment based on OpenSolaris. The main
