I’m going to be making a small server for my house to hold all my music files, as well as serve my TimeMachine backups for my Macbook. This server is also going to be more than that, being a geeky kind of guy that likes to try out several different things I also plan on adding a full fledged web server with the works “LAMP,” and possibly Ruby on Rails. Unfortunately none of the home servers sold have these capabilities or the ability to add custom software to them, aside from that their price point is a little hefty compared to buying the parts and building it yourself. Besides Linux is free, and very customizable.
So over the weekend I went out and bought a 1.5 terabyte hard drive at Frys Electronics for $130, and purchased a case, and stick of memory from New Egg under $70. Now I just need to go out and purchase the motherboard and CPU that will be the heart and brains of this. I’ve decided on going with an ATOM based CPU mainly because it does require much power (go green!) and fits in a small ITX case.
The only dilemma I am now having is trying to decide on what Linux flavor I am going to be using for this server. I’ve been doing a little bit of testing using VMWare and Fedora 10 on getting Netatalk and TimeMachine working together but have not succeeded in the task. I have had a little more success using Ubuntu and a small tutorial I found online on how to get it running, except that Ubuntu does not come with the installation packages for a LAMP server as an option during the initial installation, which will cost me more time than if I were to use Fedora. I can always go with the Ubuntu server option but I plan on keeping a Gnome gui set up on the Linux box just in case if in the future I decide on adding Boxee, Miro, or some other online media software of that type.
Of course this will be an on going project and I will do my best to keep all changes made and hopefully some pictures while building it posted on the site.
Update: added links to its respected sites 