Saturday 15 October 2011

Advantages To Building A Core Server

By Zach Jacobs


There are plenty of things that a home server can do. One of the most popular applications is to function as a media center that serves videos as well as music files. Most people would love to have movies and videos on demand that they've stored on their media server. Using the cost of storage going down and also the size of computer drives growing dramatically each year, it's becoming possible to save movies and music in high quality or a much higher resolution on a hard drive. Even multiple HD movies can be stored easily on the hard drive today. With 2008 r2 essentials all of this will become easier for you do do.

There are other ways to use this type of server as well. Other great uses include file sharing, print server, web caching, proxy services and backups. Oftentimes, some or many of these features can be performed with a single server because the computing resources required are very low.

Requirements

The computing requirements for any home server is quite low, even if it is going to be utilized for a media rackmount server. Generally, a CPU that's only 1 Ghz (quite slow by today's standards) and 256 MB of RAM should be sufficient. When the server will be used like a media server, try to have the largest hard drive possible. For protection, it may be a good idea to purchase a RAID protected storage system, but that may drive up the cost of storage significantly.

When the server is running on the Linux operating system rather than Windows, it's possible to get by with very cheap and old hardware. That's the reason the Linux operating-system is extremely popular in several consumer computer systems such as wireless routers.

Cost

One of the greatest benefits of creating a home server is cost. Since the system doesn't need to be powerful, there's a lot of money to be saved in terms of a hardware investment. Some people have been able to utilize old pc or old notebook computer.

If a computer has to be purchased, there is no need to buy something that is powerful. The least powerful and cheapest computer will probably work. The only real place not to skimp will be the hard drive if it is a media server in order to store movies and music. It may also be a wise decision to buy an uninterruptible power source so that power outages don't cause corrupted data on the server.

Security

An excellent application for a home server is to function as a proxy server as well as linux ftp server. What this means is all web browser traffic has to go through the server prior to going to the internet. For moms and dads who want to monitor their children's Internet activity, using a proxy server is a great thing.

Having a proxy server, it is possible to uncover every single website a child is visiting. It's also possible to bar certain websites with an ad-hoc basis such as pornographic websites. With a proxy server, it will be much easier to catch children going to inappropriate websites early.




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