The requirements

As always, the first thing to do is to establish your needs – the things you must have and the not so important “nice to have”-s. Is good to think in perspective but you also shouldn’t go overboard with features (or over budget).

Some of the things you should consider:

• what do you want to do – backup, media serving (and what kind of media – movies, music, pictures), internet presence (like a photo gallery or a web server), torrent download, remote connection, router, proxy, and the list can go on (maybe you want a server for fill storage, but you want to be able to connect it directly to your home theatre to play movies); be as specific as you can and think about how this can change in the near future
• how much space do you need now? how much space do you expect to use in a year or even two? this depends a lot on what your answers to the first point are
• how much can you spend? you don’t have to get everything upfront, you can complete or upgrade your setup in the future
• where will you keep you server? if you intend to keep a server running 24/7 in your bedroom, you must be very careful with the noise
• how good is your computer knowledge? what do you know and how much are you prepared to learn? Linux is now easy to install and use, and there are some great tools for administering your Linux server, but there will be moments when you may have go to the command line; only you can decide if you feel ok to go this way

For example, this is what I wanted from my server:

• the primary usage will be for file storage, backup of other computers and media serving;
• I also plan to host a personal web site on it (and I think it will be nice if the web server will stay inside a virtual machine which will be accessible from the internet)
• I’m a developer, and I would like to have some version control software on the server
• I may want to access the server from outside of my network
• it must be powerful enough to support 2 or 3 Full-HD streams at the same time and have some resources to spare (for serving a web site for example)
• the machine is expected to run 24/7, but it may sit idle for a big part of this time; it will also have a place in one of the main rooms of my house for now – so it should be as quiet as possible, reduce it’s consume when not in use (to be cooler and reduce costs) and don’t look to ugly
• after system installation, the server will not be connected to a monitor, so I must be able to configure it remotely; if possible I prefer to use a GUI instead of the command line
• the system must be able to monitor itself and alert me (and/or shut down) when something goes wrong (hi temperatures, low disk space, disk problems etc.)
• I don’t know how much space I’ll need in the future, but around 3 to 4 TB must be supported; I also want to be able to use raid 1 or 5 (all the very important files, like my work or my extensive photo collection will be backed up, but some raid protection is good to have at least for the other files)
• it must be easily upgradable (especially for adding / changing disks)
• the cost – it must be kept in control