Home Servers: Beyond the Raspberry Pi
A presentation by Raphael Guyot in April 2018:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4t1R7JQcbw
As mentioned during the talk, a rack server such as the Dell R210 II is a good candidate as:
- it is fairly silent (If you don't care about the noise, the I will work just as well).
- it is readily available used and cheap to grab on sites like Yahoo Auctions.
- hardware like that is built like a tank to last for years.
You should check the following if you consider such a purchase:
- make sure it includes ECC Memory (they usually do) and the more the better. Don't bother with anything with less than 4GB of RAM.
- get a Xeon with a L (example, E3-1220L) prefix if possible as they feature lower frequency and lower power consumption.
I am using Ubuntu Server 16.04 on mine without issues but since Ubuntu Server 18.04 just came out a few days ago you should probably default to this one now. Note that for the Dell R210 II's RAID controller only works on Windows Server, and you have to set up a RAID software driver at the Ubuntu Server install time to activate it.
In terms of self-hosted solutions, this is what I use:
- Wordpress for blogging
- Mediawiki for private wiki