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💡 About

Now a home server can come in many different forms i.e even your phone could be a serer, your laptop, your old PC. As long as it has an internet connection and it can store content then in theory it could serve as a server. However, obviously some devices are better optimized for it than others. So in this book we will discuss the different server that exists and the different architectures one can choose from.

But before we do that we would like to provide you with a diagram that shows you how a basic computer works. Not the details and nitty gritty Nerdy stuff no we will use higher levels of abstraction and just tell you what is relevant for you. If you really want to know how a computer works then we recommend to follow some computer science classes! 

So for a server to run it basically needs 5 essential things that are relevant for the average Joe! It obviously needs a lot more things but again that is not relevant for purchasing a HomeLab server. So these things are 

  1. CPU
  2. GPU
  3. RAM 
  4. Storage

Now, all of these different items comes in different sizes with different performances, but we will first focus on

  1. Redundancy
  2. High Availability
  3. Backups
OS Redundancy

For a server to run it basically needs 3 things

  1. An operating system (OS)
  2. An environment on top of that operating system on which apps can be hosted
  3. Storage that the apps build on top of that environment can use to store files e.g photos, videos, or other data

Now, your phone for instance and other cheap systems store the operating system and the storage on the same drive. This is cheap and efficient however it also has its downside. 

If you store your OS and Storage on the same drive than if the drive fails you lost everything. Not only the OS configuration but your storage data as well

On the other hand if you store the OS and Storage on different drives than if your OS fails then you will still have all your data on your Storage drives. 

 

What to do in the case of an OS failure

 

Storage Redundancy

The first topic we will discuss is storage redundancy