In this second Part, let's take a look at what I currently have my server doing.

The server fills a number of roles in the house beyond simply being a repository for all my files. The foundation for everything comes from Windows Server 2012. It may seem like overkill, since Server Essentials was really the replacement for Windows Home Server (which I probably should have been running) but it didn't support Virtual Machines, and that's what provides the foundation for all the services on KelNet.

I currently have three virtual machines active. Two Windows 8 machines, and one Windows 7. I can pop a new machine up in a few minutes notice as long as it's something that I've created (and saved) before, other wise it takes about an hour or so from start to finish. Because I decided to open services up outside of my home, I wanted to be very careful about what people could get access to in case there were any exploits run against me, etc. So any machine that runs Java, or has people logging onto it from outside the home network, is isolated (with one exception). I`m also learning more about permissions and have it opened wide enough to accomplish what I need but tight enough that I think it would be difficult for the average script-kiddie to do too much damage.

Okay, so what about the machines? The first runs my main Minecraft server for Alex and his friends. I also have TeamSpeak running on it, with 5 permanent channels, so that everyone has a voice-chat platform to use, whether they're on Minecraft or something else. Sometimes it's nice to chat without the kids.... Very simple machine and reasonably low load.

Machine two runs my Indexer, which has a fairly large database associated with it. It also runs the services that keep all my media up to date. These are scheduled and throttled services so that they don't interfere with everything else we have running and chew up all our available bandwidth. All the heavy lifting is done at night, but it still ticks over during prime time! I also have my AirVideo server running here and this makes all my media available to me anywhere I have an internet connection. It also serves up the same stuff to my friends if they choose to use it! I also throw up Minecraft servers as required on here. That way, Alex and his friends can have their own server to play with whenever they want, or I can create something just for Alex and I to play on.

Machine three is the latest addition and it runs OwnCloud. This is basically an opensource version of DropBox and the main duty of this machine is to act as a remote backup device for my family. Everything is synchronised between their own backup scheme and my server and it maintains this image 24/7. It also gives me an unlimited amount of accessible storage without uploading my own files to DropBox. So, if I really do want to keep all those sensitive files available to me anywhere, but don't want to have them available to a mass hack like we've seen in the cloud before, I can do that. I'll eventually figure out how to make it work with Evernote offline files and then I'll have my complete cloud solution for things I need the most without having to pay a monthly fee to them. It's still a work in progress...

I've had a couple of additional Linux machines up for playing with but the lack of full support for RDP (which is how I access all the machines makes it a pain to use, so I'm not really at the moment. But it still gives me the ability to learn and play...

Finally, the Windows Server acts as a file server for all my needs. All my archived media, data, pictures and backups are on here. I'm using Storage Pools to make it all happen and, as you can see below, I'm running at about 6TB in use, although that's somewhat misleading.

I have the important data in RAID just in case there's a hardware failure and I have a drive assigned as a hot spare so that the system can automatically rebuild the cluster if there's a failure. The next upgrade is to replace the hot spare with a 3TB drive and throw the 1.5TB drive into the pool for use so that my spare will equal my largest drive size in use. Seems like it should be important....

What do I have left to do? Well, I REALLY need to start considering bandwidth monitoring. I know I'm going through a fair amount at the moment, but I'm not sure exactly how much. So I need to find a way to track that a little better. I also have to figure out Quality of Service on the server to ensure that the correct network packets get the right priority, otherwise I'll start getting p0wned by the kids online. That's about it for pressing work. Apart from that, I'm happy to let it sit there and just tick along!

Next post, we'll look at the hardware that goes into supporting this mess.