[protocol77]

hey i have spare old computer sitting in my garage and i was thinking of installing and testing a linux distro as i am planning to redo my home server network soon

i am currently running Windows Home Server 2011 and i have not complaints it does everything i want it to and is reliable but i have always been curious about builds were people use linux for their home server so thought i might mess around with an old PC and see if i can get it working


I have no experience with linux over the years i have installed Distro's like ubuntu or linux mint on my systems (mostly through Virtualbox) but got frustrated pretty quick at how much more complicated it was to install any programs so went back to windows


can anyone recommend a good distro to try for a home server i am not sure if possible but seeing as all my drives are in ntfs format a distro that can be setup or can straight out of the box detect those would be best as i want to be able to have dual compatibilty between windows and linux

[hilljd00]

I use UnRAID :) check it out

[teeedubb]

I like mythbuntu. Its a lightweight distro that makes it suitable for being used as a server. I don't remember if it supports NTFS out of the box but even if it doesn't its a simple apt-get away.

[xbs08]

http://www.freenas.org/

[protocol77]

http://www.freenas.org/

can you use freenas with JBOD and without having to format them to something other than NTFS as i have terabytes of stuff on these drives and don't want to have to copy off onto another drive then copy back on again after format plus if needed want to be able to put into my windows 7 machine

[xbs08]

If you want to use NTFS then I think it's better to keep WHS.

[PatrickVogeli]

For me, I use Linux Mint and FlexRAID

[derechteversus]

Sorry for putting it this blunt:

You are doing it wrong.

You should look at your setup and make a list of things it should be able to handle.

-Raid?
-fileserver?
-samba?
-afp?
-nfs?
-dhcp server?
-tv streaming?
-firefox sync server?
-owncloud?
- . . .

Next thing would be to check what programs in a linux environment you would need to use to accomplish this.
-netatalk, samba, mdadm, . . .
if it is all basic stuff most linux distris should be able to support those things in their repositories => no hassle of compiling it yourself.
If it is something specific zfsonlinux for example, you should look at their packages and what distribution they provide it for.

It is a server and should run without any hickups, so you should check for a long term support version of your distribution.

For most server stuff you will probably have to get used to the bash, any graphical overlay will hide options and make your system prone to more errors, as there are more packages installed than necessary.

[msarro]

First, kudos for wanting to try out *nix systems. Ubuntu is a great first step to get your feet wet, and it has pretty good hardware compatibility, though it's meant more to be a desktop experience than a real server OS. Mythbuntu also works, it's a special version of ubuntu built around mythTV. You can also look at fedora/scientific linux/CentOS if you want more of a "server" experience. If you want to scare yourself off from ever using unix systems again, you can try slackware (heck, I encourage you to try it to see).

In linux there are two major flavors of distrobution, based on how you install and manage software, RPM based (Red hat, Fedora, Scientific Linux, Oracle Unbreakable Linux), and .deb based (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint). The one thing you'll need to know about installing software is how to correctly use the tools to add and remove software - rpm/yum/yast on rpm based systems, apt on deb based systems. Let the tools do the heavy lifting, it will make your life way easier.

The complexity you are seeing is mostly just things being different. Windows and OSX hide a *lot* from you, and in many cases won't let you tweak things as you want them. Linux on the other hand gives you the world right off the bat, which can be kind of jarring. There's millions of options. There's new terms. There's pictures of penguins. Oh my! Until you know what you want to run, it will be hard to say, "I only need this box to run apache, squid, and tomcat" so for now play around with ubuntu, mythbuntu, or mint and get a better idea of what the software is. Play around on the command line some. Since you already have the hardware, it's not like it costs you anything, you know? Play around, break stuff, and play some more.

As for the NTFS disks, it depends on what version of NTFS. NTFSv1 is readable and writable pretty much everywhere. Then later revisions get less and less stable, and more and more dangerous to read from and more importantly, write to. So, while you may be able to read and write to them, you can't guarantee that the act of writing won't destroy data on the disk.

Also, if you have used any type of software RAID, I can just about guarantee they won't work in linux out of the box.