Ghetto Home Server

[Darren]

I was able to snag an old 500GB WD Blue HDD from work a few weeks back and was thinking of chucking it into one of the machines buried in my closet to make a ghetto home server. I've got a couple machines in there, one of which is an XPS 8300 that is likely the best candidate. I haven't powered it up in ages and have no idea the specs. Currently no RAM but I can get up to 6GB back that I lent to a friend. Otherwise there's a couple DDR2 based machines with who knows what in them and no hard drives to be found (except the WD I just got).

I've done pretty much nothing like this before, only messed with gaming machines really and a very weak smattering of Linux while in the engineering school and did some coding (RIP).

I'd ideally like to use it to host a TeamSpeak server and any other type of game server I might want (Minecraft, Terraria, etc). Likely for a small amount of players, no more than 12 I'd guess. Eventually I'll probably set up an actual storage server for backups of my super important data (/s). Few questions I have, but really just kinda tossing around ideas here. Don't have much money to work with yet and just trying to piece together what I already have and what I might be able to snag at work (computer repair shop) for free/cheap.

1. Linux or Windows? I'd like an excuse to learn more about Linux but I have no idea which environment would be best suited for what I'm after. There is a Windows 7 Pro key on the case, and if that doesn't work I can utilize other means for Windows. If I did use Windows, I'd use 10.
2. Specs? What kind of specs are actually needed to run a server. I've only ever really configured gaming machines and don't know much about what is important. I even remember running a Minecraft server on a Pentium 4 machine without any trouble. I'd hazard a guess that the XPS has a Core 2 Duo or maybe an early i3. I'll check tomorrow.
3. Networking? This is the biggest problem. My home internet is garbage. Our LAN has a pretty solid signal out of our ATT Uverse box, but our speed package is an abysmal 12/1.5 mbps. I imagine for TeamSpeak this is a relative non issue but for other servers I might run, is this even feasible? Also how much will traffic on the network effect it?
4. Remote Access? What's the best means to control the server remotely? If I did this I'd probably have to just wire it right into the router, which is a floor below me and in a storage room out of the way. This is also likely dependent on my OS. I am also toying with the thought of dropping the machine at my friends place because he has way better internet. Doing that, I'd still like remote access but am in the dark here. He's looking to get into IT as well and might make a good partner project.

Any thoughts at all?

 

[Okedokey]

Download MS Server 2016 evaluation for 180 days. Good place to start. Your network will make it terrible though.

 

[beers]

1) Linux is free and can do most anything that you want. You can also host server daemon processes on Win 7 Pro or something if you're more comfortable with that, although it doesn't have features like hosting an AD domain or anything if you wanted to lab that out like the Windows Server version does.

2) TS3 can run on a potato, Minecraft might start chugging with a dozen people depending on the world size/complexity. It might vary a bit depending on which specific CPU is in there and the amount of RAM, although if you're doing a similar environment to as you were hosting it before then it should be a'ight.

3) It might be worth renting a dedicated server for the price of electricity at your house (which you may or may not care about). There are some boxes in KC through wholesaleinternet that are like 10 or $15 a month and offer over 100 mbit in/out consistently. Otherwise 1.5 mbit up is going to be painful for any type of game hosting. Even Teamspeak on the default codec sucks up about 50 kbit per player that you're unicasting back to each connected client.

4) It's usually best to have some kind of VPN mechanism at the edge of your network. If the router supports an OpenVPN server or something like that then you limit remote connectivity to be through that tunnel after you've authenticated with the VPN head end, instead of something like a port forward where you just blindly expose your service to the Internet.