monkstick

Windows, unless you're already very familiar with NIX based systems, NIX based security and backup solutions, etc. If you don't know these and don't have the time to properly research it, your server will eventually fail, resulting in loss of data or downtime. Basically, whatever OS you know best. Windows, OSX, Ubuntu etc. They're all fine.

Get something with the highest single thread performance you can find, as SRCDS will only use one thread (Do NOT get an AMD cpu). Ram basically doesn't matter. Get whatever you can afford. The SSD is basically pointless, unless you have it lying around. One of the best CPUs currently on the market for Source engine hosting is the 4790K, or the 4690K so aim for those. Source: Been hosting a very popular gmod server for about 6 years

Create an account and use that to access the share, instead of the guest account.

Get something like Crashplan. Its only a couple $ a month (6, I think?) for unlimited storage, and it will backup by default every 15 minutes (Configurable). It will only backup changed files ofcourse. You don't have to pay $, as you could use the second server as the destination for free.

Ah, yes! The optical drive. I forgot about that. Yeah I think it should have a standard Sata Power cable then. Thank you very much

I just ordered myself a z600 workstation to replace my home server. The plan was to use an Icy Dock ExpressCage for my drives, but I just had a sinking feeling. Does the Z600 have a 15 pin sata power cable? I can't seem to find any information online about it. Anyone got one or know about them?

I run everything headless, so I don't need any GPU integration at all. How does KVM work? Install CentOS, install KVM and then its like a lite Hypervisor?

Can you recommend a good, free hypervisor? I heard that ESXI is good, but I think last time I tried to use it, it refused to install because I had "less" than 8gb of ram. (It recognised 7.99gb)

I have been running a Linux based server for about 2 years solid until recently, I decided to change to a windows based server to learn Active Directory as I am required to learn it for work. I hate the windows server and desperately want to move back to Linux but I also want my server to be stupidly easy to make a complete backup and to restore. This is where my new idea comes in, but I want your opinion on it first. Run CentOS as the master server and tighten down its security as much as possible. Then, run one virtual machine running another distro of Linux for my actual home server use (Teamspeak, website, Minecraft, Plex, Torrents etc) and another for learning windows AD. Then, if I need to make a complete server backup and/or restore, I only need to worry about compressing and decompressing the .VDI files. Would this be a plausible way to run my home server, or is there something really obviously dumb I am missing? Also, as I have a lot of TeamSpeak and web clients, I don't have much time for testing it out in certain configurations. Another Benefit I can think of, is if I need to take the server down for a few hours for hardware maintenance, I can simply move the .VDI files onto my home computer and run them through Virtualbox for the few hours that are required.