Uses and programs for server setups?

[Shadow_Storm56]

My main curiosity here is i hear people talking about having a server in their closet or server rooms at their house.... what are these used for in a normal home? i have 2 but there for a buisness otherwise i wouldent have a need for them.... is there some amazing use for servers that i have missed or do alot of people just like having servers... 

[Guest]

Stream files to PC for eaxmple

Make a game server for minecraft

 

[Shadow_Storm56]

Spoiler

 

i have a few minecraft servers actually but not everyone does that..... i guess streaming files yea.... too bad you can't do that across the internet i always wanted to make my own personal cloud so i could have a folder on my desktops, phone and tablet that diden't mean they all had the file but all had access to it. 

[Goksha]

I have all mine as a lab for tool development, training, certification, and testing random thing I can't do in production... like pulling power from a  device and seeing what happens.

 

The other part of my stuff is for media streaming, and an offsite backup of my families data they have at their homes.

[Shadow_Storm56]

Oh I see. how do you do off site backup?

[Goksha]

Without going into to much detail on how I do it all (that could be a thread of its own), it really depends on what they're using for storage, ranging from Simple windows shares, to Freenas, to a local VMware datastore, and in one case, a CEPH cluster).

 

But the basic premise is a local script copies and encrypts all data to be backed up locally first. Then that data is transferred over a site-to-site VPN back to a dedicated VM for each of them. Once completed, the previous backup is deleted, essentially retaining one local copy of all data.

 

Since I'm not doing incremental backups, it's not very efficient, and I'm running low on space. I'm working on moving the largest of the backups over to incremental. Once day, I may put a post/guide up somewhere on how I did it.

[Danielh90]

I have VMware on it and I have  ubutunu os on it for my minecraft servers and then two window servers 2012 1 for game servers and another is production meaning web server/YouTrack