Prepping for my home server
1/20/2024
5:20pm
New year.... New project!
Server Equipment
I've been heavily into Networking the past month, and have pretty much decided that I want to be in the cybersecurity field for a career. The past couple of weeks, I have been studying for the CompTia Net+ cert while in college for a bit, and Im hoping I can get my foot in the door with it once I Pass the test. I also plan to get the CCNA, and Sec+ after that. And I would like to get all of those before I finish my Bachelors in computer science (im a very optimistic person if you havent noticed lol).
Anyways, lets start talking about my homeserver. I recently acquired a big 5 bay NAS off of facebook marketplace that I plan to use and build my server on top of. It's a HP Gen7 Microserver, and its fucking awesome. Theres 4 3.5" drive bays inside the cage, but above that is a 5.25" optical drive bay. No way in hell am I going to use optical media for anything, so im probably going to use it as another 3.5" bay. There all just SATA ports so Im chilling. Theres two low profile PCIE slots that I plan to add some usb 3.0 ports on, to further expand the drive capacity of this beast. Its a two core beast that has 4gb of ECC RAM. The ECC ram is a nice touch.
I do have a small 2 bay WD nas, but I plan to sell that for more cash that I can use for this project. Im not too sure on keeping this but I do really like it. It reminds me of a toaster the way you insert the drives, so I call it the Toaster NAS.
I have a couple of mini PC's that I plan too install Debian on and use as Linux Servers. I'm thinking maybe hosting my own personal Email service, and a Plex server, but Im not too sure just yet. Im just thinking of ideas.
The next main addition to my server is a small 8-port Cisco Switch. You cant have a big server without a switch. This one in particular is buissness grade, so this thing can take a beating and last forever. I went for Cisco Specifically for that reason. They are known to be the Gold standard in the Buisness Networking industry, so I went for that one. it was super cheap on ebay (16$), and its in great condition. I plan to hook this puppy up to a wifi extender, which is essentially the router, and route all the traffic from my server to my main Modem that way. I might buy a cheap router if a good deal shows up on my facebook feed lol.
for all the nerds reading this, the switch is a Cisco SG100D-08-NA. Pic below
The way all this equipment will be stationed physically is unknown. I cant put this stuff on a traditional server rack so I have to get a bit creative. Its probably all going to be stacked ontop of each other, but I have seen multiple racks that have been 3d printed on thingiverse that I might give a try.
Drives and Formatting
For the drives, I have hella old external USB drives that I plan to break open and use. They arent fast by any means, but Thats not a concern for me. A couple of Seagate and WD 1tb drives will be used. I plan to switch them out regularly once i fill them up.
For the formatting, I really dislike the idea of RAID. I understand why its used in certain places, but I personally wont be using that. I think its a waste of power and drives to just mirror all your files to multiple drives. Also, drives are expensive, and I dont want to spend 100's of dollars on them. I would prefer to extend there life as much as possible. Plus I just like having drives for certain things, it must be a OCD thing idk lol. I want to allocate one drive to a specific thing. One for movies and tv shows, one for family photos and videos, one for video games, and one for just general file backups. JBOD is what I want.
I plan to update this blog entry as I acquire more equipment, but this is all I have for now.