My wife and I have run a server at home pretty much continuously since we came to California in 1995. I remember carrying stacks of Slackware floppy disks home from work: whatever code was needed, I downloaded it at work to a 1.44M floppy disk, and installed it when I got home. Lots of driver problems and kernel recompiles, and more floppy disks with more code. If memory serves, the first server had a Pentium processor with 66MHz. I managed to get an early version of IP masquerading to work (today called NAT). We had three Macs connected to our server via AppleTalk. Whenever you wanted to access the internet from one of them, the server would automatically dial a 14.4k modem into our ISP at the time to setup a connection. It took about 30 seconds before the first page came up. Quite advanced for the time!

So much about history.

The current server has an Intel i3 quad-core which must have been cheap at Fry’s some day. It has 8GB of RAM, runs Ubuntu and serves as firewall, DNS server, DHCP server, file server etc. It also runs a few XEN virtual machines for playing around, and holds a RAID 10 array for important files and backups. One of the disks is in the RAID array is starting to fail, and another has errors in the SMART log, so I gotta do something about it. And giving that the Indie Box Project is getting usable, this is the time to put Indie Box software on it.

So last night I went out and got two new 2TB drives, which will run in a RAID 1 configuration. I used another old PC to create the RAID array, and currently I’m copying files from the old array. (The server motherboard has no more open SATA ports, so I had to use another box.) As I progress in this project to make my home server speak Indie Box, I might as well write down my experiences.

Links to all parts: Step 1: assemble and test hardware; Step 2: install Arch Linux; Step 3: networking; Step 4: make it an Indie Box!; Step 5: deploy Shaarli via Indie Box.