What to do with a home server

[.Ocean]

Hey guys, I recently purchased a super cheap Core 2 Quad system with 8GB of Ram and I have a decent xeon I can throw into it with the 771 LGA mod. I want to use the system as a home server (mostly to learn with) but I have no idea what I should do with it. A lot of people who I have asked have said to turn it into a pfsense box which seems really wasteful to me and not what I want to do anyway. A lot of people have said to turn it into a home file server which I also dont want to considering I already have a NAS.

Does anyone have any cool ideas of what I could do with it?

[Brian Furious]

If you don't know what to do with a server, just don't use it, it just consume electricity. 

 

I'd use it as a NAS or Plex server, Proxy, VM etc

[NelizMastr]

If you want to do more than one thing with it, turn it into a hypervisor using ESXi, XenServer, ProxMox or HyperV. You'll be able to run 2-3 VMs no problem.

[Jarsky]

3 hours ago, Brian Furious said:

If you don't know what to do with a server, just don't use it, it just consume electricity. 

 

This ^

 

If you want to "learn" with it, decide what you want to learn,and go from there. 

Are you interested in Virtualization? Unix? Wintel / Domain Controller / AD? Network test labs? Programming? Web Design? Proxy/Loadbalancer? etc....

[Pixel5]

i think the biggest learning here is that you bought the solution for a problem you don't have.

Meaning you bought a server but don't need one.

 

if you want to learn something about servers and networking you are better of with a raspberry pi as working with the big and loud server will get so annoying that you will stop and let it collect dust in the corner after a week.

[.Ocean]

On 11/2/2017 at 6:33 AM, Pixel5 said:

i think the biggest learning here is that you bought the solution for a problem you don't have.

Meaning you bought a server but don't need one.

 

if you want to learn something about servers and networking you are better of with a raspberry pi as working with the big and loud server will get so annoying that you will stop and let it collect dust in the corner after a week.

Well who needs fun little projects anyway right? Its pretty well known Raspberry Pis don't exactly have the computing power to do very much and considering the machine I purchased ran me a whole 2$ which is less than half the price of the raspberry pi zero I wouldn't be too mad if I got it and the box was empty.

As for the noise/electricity bill argument I find it pretty convenient that I have a separate room to put the computer in as well as not having to pay for the electricity because my bill is a flat rate. I would like to thank you though for coming into a thread that explicitly asked for fun ideas for a hobbyist to do with a home server just to tell me that I made a mistake by even dropping the 2$ on it.

[Oxydoreduction]

1 hour ago, .Ocean said:

Well who needs fun little projects anyway right? Its pretty well known Raspberry Pis don't exactly have the computing power to do very much and considering the machine I purchased ran me a whole 2$ which is less than half the price of the raspberry pi zero I wouldn't be too mad if I got it and the box was empty.

As for the noise/electricity bill argument I find it pretty convenient that I have a separate room to put the computer in as well as not having to pay for the electricity because my bill is a flat rate. I would like to thank you though for coming into a thread that explicitly asked for fun ideas for a hobbyist to do with a home server just to tell me that I made a mistake by even dropping the 2$ on it.

2$ is indeed a nice price.

As Jarsky said, you have a lot of options on learning.

Are you planning on doing any nas, domain controller, plex server,...?

If you plan to run multiple os, you can already start with vmware esxi (or microsoft hyper v if you wish) to be able to install some virtual machines.

And by the way, servers can be very silent.