Server or Desktop???

Garbz · Dec 19, 2009

What is a server? It's definitely not the box or the name in the product. My desktop computer here runs a file server and a webserver, but it is by no means a "server" fit for purpose. On the other hand my old desktop machine that is now sitting in the cupboard under the stairs is now definitely a server, loaded with only software to do things such as share files, run my website, run a complete mail server, a media server to host movies for my tv.

In essence a solution with "server" in the title from a big name company is likely to be a colossal waste of your dollars. These days "servers" come with multicore Xeon processors, large amount of RAM and all sorts of features for the modern workforce. Unless you're going to be serving up data to 20+ people at the same time it is entirely overkill. Just think back to what people did years ago, and I remember talking to someone recently that ftp.cdrom.com was hosted on a 200Mhz Pentium Pro and yet still ran a website which handled 1TB of traffic per day.

Every individual requirement can be handled by a software package most of them free. If you're geeky and inclined to experiment I recommend the Linux platform for this, but if not then stick with a standard windows machine, anything as old as windows 2000 is fine. Then it's just a matter of dealing with each issue as it arises.

Dao already mentioned DynamicDNS. There are free services that do this, but you could also just register a domain and DNS package too. www.benhasajeep.com can't be too expensive, we're talking about less than $100 over several years.

- You can set up a little home network along with file and printer sharing natively in all versions of windows.
- DynamicDNS will ensure you always know the name of your computer rather than having to memorise an IP address which may change.
- Your remote access to your home network can be taken care of by OpenVPN - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Just set it up on your desktop "server" and on your laptop "client" and you have a secure connection to your home from anywhere in the world as if you'd plugged directly into the network... just a tad slower

- Want to run a website but don't want to buy a small business server or other Microsoft licence that includes IIS, then you want Apache HTTP Server - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Well you want it anyway, it's much more secure than IIS is, and comes with no restrictions. It's the free software that runs much of the internet including this very site according to netcraft.

Did I miss anything? Give me a problem and I can most likely recommend to you a solution that costs nothing except for a bit of your time

JClishe · Dec 20, 2009

The OP specifically mentioned Windows Home Server and I'm kinda surprised no one jumped on that option, because to me it's the obvious solution.

WHS is designed to address households like yours: You have multiple PC's with important data on each, no centralized storage for media (photos, videos, movies, etc), you probably have no backups of your laptops so if one suddenly died you'd probably lose important data (or you have to carry around an external USB drive like you mentioned), you'd like to be able to access your data remotely, and most importantly - you want a solution that is both inexpensive and easy to manage, you don't want to be a geek to manage it, you simply want it to "just work".

If this sounds like you, than you should give a hard look at WHS devices.

I personally have the Acer AH340 (Amazon.com: Acer Aspire AH340-UA230N Home Server: Computer & Accessories) but the HP's are good as well. Mine has an Atom CPU, 2GB of RAM, and 4TB of storage, and it cost me a whopping $450 from NewEgg (the list price is somewhere around $379 I think, which comes with a 1TB disk, but Newegg was running a special on the home server + additional storage). Because it has an Atom processor, it doesn't consume much power, doesn't generate much heat, and is whisper quiet. It has 4 drawer-type hard drive bays so if you want to add more storage all you need to do is slide another hard drive in. That's it. You don't have to bother with creating additional partitions or extending existing partitions, etc. Windows automatically adds the new storage to the existing volume, which is striped across all disks so if you have 4 hard drives you see the total storage as 1 big volume that's the combined total of all 4 drives. And there is automatic data redundancy built in, so if you experience a hard drive failure you won't lose any data.

There's also a WHS client that you can install on your laptops that will automatically back them up every night. And if your laptops are in sleep mode when a backup needs to start, WHS will wake them up, do the backup, then put them back to sleep. These backups have saved me a number of times; if you accidentally delete something on your laptop its really easy to use the WHS client to restore the files.

If you have a uPNP router, WHS will automatically configure your router to give you remote access to WHS's default website - you don't need to do anything to configure either, it just works. And you get your own URL within the homeserver.com domain for free. You just go to yourservername.homeserver.com and you can remotely control any of your PC's, access the Home Server console, access all of the files on your home server, and upload new files.

Sorry if this sounds like a commercial for Windows Home Server, but I absolutely love mine and highly recommend that you look into one. Every requirement that you've mentioned aligns absolutely perfectly with the very things that WHS was designed to provide a solution for, and it was designed to be as simple as possible for average, non-IT people to be able to use effectively. I could go on all day talking about how much I love my WHS, it's that good.

You might also want to check out this site to see the add-ins that are available for WHS. There are tons of things you can do with your WHS beyond what I've mentioned: MS Windows Home Server

JClishe · Dec 20, 2009

Garbz said:
Want to run a website but don't want to buy a small business server or other Microsoft licence that includes IIS, then you want Apache HTTP Server - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Well you want it anyway, it's much more secure than IIS is,

This is highly misleading.

The security of a webserver is dependant on the security controls that the administrator chooses to implement, and the inherent security of the applications being hosted. Saying that one is more secure than the other is pointless. Either of them can be made to be extremely secure, or extremely insecure. And there's a very strong argument to be made that Apache is more difficult to manage than IIS (especially if it's on a LAMP stack), so giving a novice the advice to go with Apache over IIS for the sake of security is actually counterproductive, because a novice can usually secure an IIS site better than an Apache site. So if they took the advice to go with Apache because "it's more secure", it's quite likely that they would end up with a less secure solution.

There are clearly a ton of caveats in the statement that I just made, but that just underscores the fact that you cannot responsibly say that one is more secure than the other unless you're providing a lot of additional data to support your statement.

Garbz · Dec 21, 2009

Very true. However as far as attacks in the wild go they are stacked quite heavily against the Windows / IIS platform. In this case it's security by avoidance, much like the Apple crowd. And while setting up a LAMP system is like a trip to the dentist you said it yourself the OP is after something simple in which case if you install Apache and adjust the default config only enough to get the website working you'll have a very secure piece of software.

The home server is a fitting product though.

CxThree · Dec 21, 2009

Windows home server is actually a good solution for the OP.

It sits headless in your home, connected to your network. It will provide an external facing website https:\\yournameofchoice.homeserver.com to allow you toaccess your files and remote desktop to any of your pcs in the home. Additionally, it will backup each macning via an image every night. In the event of a hard drive failure in a pc, you can quickly restore your previous backup. I've done it and it rocked. My wife's laptop hd failed. It took about 35 minutes and she was back up and running with a new drive I installed. Home server restored her last backup and she hardly even notived she had had an issue at all.

For the money, its hard to beat. You can get them on newegg from $299 and up.

More Info:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/default.mspx

RAZKY · Jul 7, 2022

jefferyjordan26 said:
With the right settings on your router, you should be able to keep your network's IP address static. The worst case scenario is that it will remain dynamic, although TW seldom updates them. If you were gone and unable to connect, you could ask your wife to log on and confirm what the new IP is for you, or you could check it sometimes to make sure the IP hadn't changed before you left the area, for instance.

After 12 1/2 years, the issue is most likely irrelevant.