First Server Recommendations

[SSHaugen]

Hey! 

 

I have been trying to go it alone, learning about servers.  When I got to the point when I was ready to start making hardware choices, I was just overwhelmed by the number of choices available just on the Supermicro web site.  I've built my share of computers, but the range of processors and other resources told me that I need help.  

I found Linus just today and hopefully someone can give me some guidance to narrow the selection with information on what to look for.  

 

This is going to be a home server, mostly for media to stream the videos I have to devices in the house and hopefully to my mobile devices through a remote login.  

In addition, I want to host a mail server and maybe web page for my dad's domain.  I'm sure these will be virtual machines, so this is going to need some horsepower as well as lots of storage.  

 

I'm not made of money, but I'm willing to buy good components to make a quality server that will last quite a while.  

My thoughts on hardware are as follows:

I have a 4U chassis that I can build it in.  

Storage - 8 to 10TB in a RAID 1+0 for speed and redundancy. 

Multiple NICs - each VM will need its own.  

MB - PLEASE HELP 

Processor - PLEASE HELP 

RAM - lots of DDR3.  Advice welcome 

[Jae Tee]

No one? Im quiet curious myself what people have in mind.

[ChalkChalkson]

So depending on what you want to do exactly, the best option for a home server is likely just to run a low powered desktop computer made from consumer parts. I have a Pentium G2200 that streams 4K HDR content to my TV without a problem while also running an apache webserver and a teamspeak server.

Building in a server chassis is pretty inconvenient since those are ugly and bulky, so its hard to make space for them. So real reason to use them unless you have a large rack that you want to store multiple servers in.

For media streaming etc I have an old written unraid guide here that should still be up to date (refference it sometimes myself lol). I dont explore mail servers there though since self hosting those is probelmatic. Lots of services blacklist all residential IPs as spamm by default, and most other services have large blacklists of residential IPs because viruses that infect your PC and send spam mails from there used to be very common. So, while setting up a mailserver is a neat learning experience it is pretty impracticle since you will often end up in spam folders no one checks.

[SSHaugen]

On 5/28/2020 at 4:24 PM, ChalkChalkson said:

So depending on what you want to do exactly, the best option for a home server is likely just to run a low powered desktop computer made from consumer parts. I have a Pentium G2200 that streams 4K HDR content to my TV without a problem while also running an apache webserver and a teamspeak server.

Building in a server chassis is pretty inconvenient since those are ugly and bulky, so its hard to make space for them. So real reason to use them unless you have a large rack that you want to store multiple servers in.

For media streaming etc I have an old written unraid guide here that should still be up to date (refference it sometimes myself lol). I dont explore mail servers there though since self hosting those is probelmatic. Lots of services blacklist all residential IPs as spamm by default, and most other services have large blacklists of residential IPs because viruses that infect your PC and send spam mails from there used to be very common. So, while setting up a mailserver is a neat learning experience it is pretty impracticle since you will often end up in spam folders no one checks.

Thanks for the reply.  I built my house with this in mind.  Not that I have a large server rack, but I have every room wired with 2 pulls of ethernet cable and use a patch panel in a custom built 19" rack so everything has a home.  The intention was always to have my own private "cloud" for security and safety.  

To me, it is the desktops and towers that are cumbersome and don't have a place.  We use laptops and our phones for everything and yes, we successfully stream HD video through a laptop. We are ripping our movie collection to gain space and need someplace to keep several TB of movie and other video. 

I was hoping to get some suggestions about a solid motherboard and processors.  I read some articles a while back about using multiple, older, slower, processors in lieu of the latest, fastest ones.  Is that a good idea? 

[ChalkChalkson]

15 hours ago, SSHaugen said:

Thanks for the reply.  I built my house with this in mind.  Not that I have a large server rack, but I have every room wired with 2 pulls of ethernet cable and use a patch panel in a custom built 19" rack so everything has a home.  The intention was always to have my own private "cloud" for security and safety.  

To me, it is the desktops and towers that are cumbersome and don't have a place.  We use laptops and our phones for everything and yes, we successfully stream HD video through a laptop. We are ripping our movie collection to gain space and need someplace to keep several TB of movie and other video. 

I was hoping to get some suggestions about a solid motherboard and processors.  I read some articles a while back about using multiple, older, slower, processors in lieu of the latest, fastest ones.  Is that a good idea? 

If you want to stream movies specifically, I'd recommend running a modern chip for h256 encoding. If you want to rip 4K blue rays and play them back on your laptop without converting them first, maybe even get a 1050 to hardware accelerate the encoding stream, encoding 4k hdr is tough. If you are going for new hardware (for example for this reason or warranty), try to get a rackmount case that supports standard atx and has full height pcie slots. If you find (or build) one for a reasonably price, just get the cheapest consumer board from a brand whos bios you like that has all the features and ports you want / need.

I am actually just building a new nas (my old 6TB one is full with no more free sata slots) and here is what I am getting:

• i5 9400F (if you don't buy a GPU get a non F 10th gen chip)
• gtx 1050
• ASRock B365M Pro4

Ill be running Unraid with Plex for movie streaming in a Docker container.