I don't have the money, honey--but it's got the time.

April 23, 2012 10:15 AM

Finally have a for-reals home server. What ELSE can I do with it?

I picked up an HP Proliant N40L for a good price about a week ago. It's currently just running Linux Mint, but I will likely upgrade to unRaid as soon as I can afford some more hard drives and assure that ZoneMinder will work for unraid.

Right now it's running Sabnzbd+/SickBeard/CouchPotato/Headphones/Zoneminder/Ktorrent/Plex/sFTPd

What else should I be doing with it? Rest of the network is Windows and Android, if that matters to your suggestion. WDLive and Roku onboard as well.

Oh...and it's headless, no displays for now.

posted by TomMelee to computers & internet (6 answers total)

Irssi for a constant IRC connection you can ssh into from anywhere, if you're into that sort of thing. BitlBee might be worth looking into as well.
posted by ODiV at 10:22 AM on April 23, 2012

Things I ran before I lived on a boat and still had space and bandwidth for servers:

• Squid and Squidguard proxy server I could pass my Internet traffic through to filter out time-wasting websites when I was supposed to be working
• Calibre e-book management software's web server to make my e-book library available on the web for my friends to peruse
• Forked-daapd to serve my music library over the network to iTunes and Songbird clients
• Apache/Django for little utility webapps (to-do management, etc.) that I wrote myself

posted by zjacreman at 11:25 AM on April 23, 2012

Unsure of the software package for Linux, but if you're just looking for ideas, you could rip all of your DVDs and use it as a media server for any number of devices, including a Ps3 or XBOX if you have one.
posted by softlord at 11:57 AM on April 23, 2012

Subsonic for remote streaming access to your music collection? (Including an Android client, if you donate to the project.)
posted by fings at 2:47 PM on April 23, 2012

Check out x2go - their website is never terribly up to date, but it's a great remote-desktop application based on the NX/FreeNX protocol that allows you to remote in to a desktop session served on a separate display. That way, you can have a convenient "display" for your headless system. The Windows client isn't "portable" per se, and requires administrative permissions to install, but once you've installed it on a USB drive, it will run without administrator access on any other Windows machine.

Maybe also think about having your server do automatic backups of your other network devices, using something like BackupPC.

And check out owncloud if you're exposing your home server to the outside world. It's not mature, but it's getting there.
posted by dilettanti at 3:04 PM on April 23, 2012

Thanks for the answers. Currently I don't do anything with IRC...that's been a few years, but maybe I'll look again? I had no idea Calibre had a server component, that's pretty sexy. I'm already running Apache/SQL/phpMyAdmin because of ZoneMinder.

I'm already running Plex and samba for media share, and currently using GoogleMusic to make stuff available on my Android, but I'll check out subsonic, I've heard good things. x2g0 sounds pretty neat, I've been lazy so far about setting up remote access, and my teamviewer install borked for some reason or another.
posted by TomMelee at 4:10 PM on April 23, 2012