Earlier this year, I began a project to build my own home server. My plan was to have most of my data stored on a central machine at home. I decided to make it Linux based and I chose Freenas.
I looked at my local Freecycle group and saw that someone had offered a used computer. I followed up on this offer and I received a very smelly and dusty computer. It smelled of dog, cigarettes and foot odor, combined into one putrid pong. I had to scrub the case to get rid of the smell and I even had to wash the motherboard with water to get the dust off of it. I then spent a while drying parts thoroughly with a hair dryer and left it for around two weeks to dry in the air. I was delighted when I eventually pushed the power button and the machine came to life.
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| The old filthy heatsink that came out of the computer. |
I then installed two 500gb Western Digital Green hard drives into the server. I also prepared a usb flash drive and a Freenas CD for running the OS. Afterwards, it was quite easy to set up I enabled Samba, FTP, SSH, bitTorrent, UPnP and Itunes media server.
Specs:
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ @ 2.0Ghz
Asus M2N-MX motherboard
2Gb ddr2 OCZ ram
2x Western Digital Green 500Gb Drives
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| The Finished Server |
Overall I think that the project was quite successful and I have been running this system for a few months now. There is a great sense of satisfaction when you have transformed a piece of garbage into a useful machine. If you happen to be reading this and you have any questions on how I set it all up, feel free to leave a comment or contact me.
