Developers, do you have a home server (cluster) running 24x7?

Question

If yes, what's the hardware and software configuration (CPU/memory/disk/OS/server software etc.)?

What kind of services the server provides (file sharing,backup,DB/Web/Streaming server,CVS/SVN server etc.)?

Answer 1

No, I have not.

Is it programming related?

Answer 2

I have a few servers running 24x7:

• A shell server providing SSH access to my home network. It also runs MySQL and Apache for development/testing for personal projects, as well as my personal CVS tree.
• A File server with 2TB of storage for backups and general file storage.
• A VMWare server. I use this to deploy small VM instances for development and package testing. It's definitely nice to be able to test that a .deb file will work on a machine other than where it was built before uploading it to other users.

All these servers are running Ubuntu, and they are all recycled desktop machines.

Answer 3

No, why should I? I mean, shouldn't your backup always be offsite? ;)

Answer 4

I have an Ubuntu server running at home which provides SSH (for both access as well as a SOCKS5 "proxy"), FTP and SMB (windows file sharing; aka CIFS) to my home network, and Squid for an HTTP proxy. It also runs an SVN server where I keep all of my important data.

My VPS (which hosts my website) provides my mail forwarding (*@mydomain.com goes to my gmail account), web services (obviously), and an off-site backup of some important data. Other important data is backed up to Amazon's S3 using S3FS (from Linux; Windows equivelents exist as well).

C development is done on one of the home machines; for my pet PHP projects, I use my VPS (NGINX + MySQL, mostly)

Answer 5

I have a Sun Enterprise 250 with 2 * 400MHz UltraSPARC-II CPUs and 512MB RAM (I have a couple of extra modules that I haven't gotten round to installing yet). It's running Solaris 9 and provides me with SSH access from anywhere. The machine is a bit dated but it is powerful enough for my purpose and this is by far the most reliable piece of hardware I have ever owned.

I use it to mirror my source code from work so I can back it up to tape. I have irssi running in a screen for when I need urgent software support. It is also running Apache, MySQL and PHP for my blog.

Answer 6

I have a dual Xeon 3GHz, 2GB RAM, server running Windows 2003. It's doing NAT, VPN, WEB, SQL, storage. Always on.

I used to have a NT4.0 cluster with shared SCSI just for experiments. Very nice and interesting stuff. I could never get it running Windows 2000 Advanced Server. The SCSI stuff was too fragile.

I have also done experiments (unsuccessful) with Beowulf cluster using 4 PC's. Trouble mostly caused by unworkable network drivers.

Two dual processor Silicon Graphics Origin 200 servers have been sitting in my basement. If I had the Craylink cable I've been told it would act as a single machine. That would be interesting.

Answer 7

I have a server with 2TB RAID-5 running under openSUSE 11.0 Linux. It's a custom built PC using the 3-ware 9550SX RAID controller (8 ports), 2GB of RAM, a dual core intel CPU, three 4-in-3 drive bays.

It's running 24/7 for about four years, now. My main use it BitTorrent (Vuze, OSS DVD images) and overnight rendering and general file storage/backup of my other computers (so I have to backup just one machine to external HDs).

I used to have one slot of the 4-in-3 (4x3.5" drives in 3x5.25" drive slots) connected to a free port of the RAID controller for the backup HD but after some trouble with timeouts after inserting the drive, I've moved the disk to an empty slot connected directly to the RAID controller on the mainboard.

As an additional measure, I'm doing nightly incremental backups on an external USB drive which I power up and down with a shell script (so it doesn't have to run 24/7).

For backup software, I'm using find, cpio and rsync plus a 100 line shell script.

Answer 8

Not anymore. I used to have 3 servers running at home. Sendmail, BIND, Samba, QPopper, and Apache running off an old Sparc2 on NetBSD. A FreeBSD x86 box for backups. Finally, a Windows box for doing remote desktop.

Not anymore though. Between the high cost of dedicated Internet and the fact that it's so much cheaper and less labor intensive to outsource it, it was time to get rid of them. Had great fun setting it up and learned a lot, but it got to the point of being a chore and I wasn't learning anything new anymore.

Answer 9

I have a Server running 24/7:

OS: Ubuntu 8.10 Server

CPU: AMD 2.0GHz Quad core

RAM: 4GB DDR2

HDD: 1TB x4 (in a kernel driven RAID10 configuration providing just under 2TB of usable space)

I use it to host a private SVN server for all my code projects as well as a easy place to FTP things to my self. And it hosts all the media files for my media center, so any computer on the network as well as my media center can all access the content equally.

It runs a LAMP stack to server simple pages, mostly directory listings for files.

SVN for code versioning.

SMB for content sharing.

HLDS for dedicated game servers.

It has made many parts of my life so very easy and convenient :)

Answer 10

I've got a Sun Ultra 10 with a gig of RAM running OpenBSD. It downloads and sorts my e-mail, sharing it out over IMAP so I can get at it from various other computers on my network. It's also running ssh so I can get onto my network from anywhere, and always has screen running so I can always be on IRC.

Answer 11

I'm using an old IBM PC-300 desktop built from parts I found in the trash. Right now it's headless with a Pentium 3, 256MB of RAM and a 40GB hard drive. Off the top of my head it's running BIND, DHCP, Git, a Lighttpd/Postgres/PHP web server and a few IM/IRC things.

I used to use my desktop as a server but changed for a bunch of reasons - the hardware is flaky (tending to crash hard while web browsing), it has a noisy fan, and it eats electricity (200W under full load, while the P3 uses about 70).

Answer 12

I have a bunch of old boxes running at home.

• Celeron 2400 768MB RAM, 40GB HD

• Dual Pentium III 733, 256MB RAM, 40GB HD Both are running Ubuntu. I use them to do distributed programming in Erlang or Ruby.

• Another Celeron running latest pfSense, as the broadband router and VPN server.

• Yet another Celeron running FreeNAS with 1GB RAM and 200GB HD, as my file server (samba, ftp, rsync)

• One Athlon X2 4000 with 2GB RAM, 200GB HD running Windows XP, used by the wife. This box can also dual-boot into Ubuntu, in case I need to run a big experiment.

• My own workstation is a 24in iMac with 3GB RAM. There is also a Windows XP virtual machine running within, using vmware fusion.