Home server practical?

[yesac142]

The background:
At my house we have a Win XP desktop, a Win XP laptop, and my desktop running Kubuntu Edgy. There's a second HD on the Kubuntu box that I intend to share pics/music with the XP machines. Backups are done on the desktops to two external HDs. We don't share anything online. We also have an old desktop that is about to be put to pasture.

The question:
I've been hearing a lot about home servers and home file sharing setups. How is having a home server different/better than just having shared folders? Is there any reason to use our old pc as a server?

[penguin.ch]

Re: Home server practical?

Is there any reason to use our old pc as a server?

In short, centralization is the magic word - some love it, some hate it ...

Birdy

[monte48lowes]

Re: Home server practical?

Here is one reason. The server can contain two hard drives. Information from one can be backed up to the other.
Another. The computer that would normally share the information would not need to be on all the time.

Mike

[Rob_H]

Re: Home server practical?

I set up an old box with Kubuntu to function as a server to backup my wife's PC and mine over the network automatically. The benefit for me is automation because I never remember to back up on my own.

BackupPC works great for this, by the way.

[yesac142]

Re: Home server practical?

I guess this is where I'm missing something. Couldn't my Kubuntu desktop do the automatic backups to an external drive instead of having a completely separate computer? I've been using the program Keep and it seems to be doing fine (I'll look at BackupPC).

I can kind of see the advantage of turning the other computers off, but ours generally stay on anyway.

This home server thing still seems like a "6 of one, half dozen of another" thing. I'm not trying to knock anyone else's setup, just trying to learn the concepts. I appreciate your responses.

[penguin.ch]

Re: Home server practical?

I guess this is where I'm missing something. Couldn't my Kubuntu desktop do the automatic backups to an external drive instead of having a completely separate computer?

I guess now we are getting to the core of the matter: of course you could back up your desktop to an external harddisk ("locally", so to speak), and the second desktop to a second harddisk, and the laptop to a third one, et certera ad infinitum - I suppose you get the point I am driving at ...

From my experience, all boils down to "keep it as simple as possible - but not simpler than reasonable" ... my little network, for example, consists of several real as well as virtual machines - and all they share (via Samba) is one laser printer, one common folder (i.e. the main machine's "Desktop") for file sharing and one external harddisk for backups.

HTH
Birdy

[Rob_H]

Re: Home server practical?

This home server thing still seems like a "6 of one, half dozen of another" thing. I'm not trying to knock anyone else's setup, just trying to learn the concepts. I appreciate your responses.

Everyone's situation is different. My wife and I both have laptops. They're not on the network or turned on all the time and I don't own an external hard drive. BackupPC works well for us because it's very forgiving if a machine drops off the LAN for a while. (It just tries again later.) Plus, the backup server doubles as a music server: It's hooked up to our stereo system, where there's no space for a monitor.

Don't let the tail wag the dog. If you have a need for a home server, then Kubuntu's a good choice for running one. But if you don't, then you don't.