If you are feeling particularly suicidal, then you can spend an hour and a half watching these videos.

In the first part, I talk about some of the hardware options available for building a fault tolerant home server. Providing that you are happy with command line entering, then you can follow the how-to and the theory plans in order to create your own Open Solaris home server.

Along the way you'll learn how to plan your directory structure, learn how to apply user and group permissions to control who can see what, and also a little about the security aspect of design.

I chose Open Solaris for a few reasons...

1) It is free.
2) It has Sun Microsystems engineers behind much of the design.
3) It is secure out of the box
4) It uses ZFS

You can get Open Solaris from here but I would STRONGLY recommend that you wait for the 2010-3 build first.

I have a good deal of respect for many of the Sun Microsystems engineers. Yes, it is true that Sun's philosophy ran it in to the financial mire and that Oracle ended up buying it out, but that philosophy allowed some really wonderful stuff to flourish. People really seemed to be free from the managerial grief and I think it ended up in some wonderful product.

Technical translation...

At work, I play my part in looking after Ingres databases on Sun Sparc hardware running Solaris (the non-open version) and in terms fo money and actual footprint of hardware, I don't believe there is anything in its league which can touch Sun. If we were to translate the systems on to i386 hardware running Microsoft, we'd be dealing with something probably four times the physical size and, with multiple copies of the operating system (we would need multiple copies of Windows Server and Windows SQL ... and even then each database is so big that the consultants that deal with these databases day in, day out, say that MS SQL wouldn't be able to deal with one of our database instances.) The costs would rise and the performance would drop off a cliff ... and even if we did it, there would be no way that they would support us. It would be a suicide move.

Non-Technical translation...

Microsoft products don't scale up, can't play with the big boys and ... well, if you chose the MS path ... good luck.

So Open Solaris has many sections that are locked down. If you want them, you have to open them up. It is a philosophy which ensures that you are safe.

One of the people teaching a Solaris course that I went on, told a story about some of the customers complaints. "I've installed this, but I can't telnet to the box." "Exactly. Telnet is insecure so it is disabled. If you want it, you just have to enable it, but it is at your risk." The customer wasn't happy with this; they wanted all the features to be ready and switch on after installation. They just didn't get the security philosophy. More on this later.

ZFS is the acronym for Zetabyte File System. You remember the problem we had with FAT reaching its storage file limit so FAT32 came along to replace it, and then that hit its limit and NTFS came along to replace that? Well, ZFS can handle a Zetabyte of data in a pool before it has trouble. A Zetabyte is many, many terrabytes. It is going to be around for a long time.

ZFS has much more to offer than this, however. Even in this tutorial I'm only going to show you a mere fraction of its flexibility and power. It has powers of error correction and file system maintenance that other systems don't have. While some file systems would come across an illegal block, there are times when it would just naively serve you that bad block fully believing it to be valid data. ZFS can detect these blocks and do something about it.

And there is more to ZFS than even this. However, if you've got the stomach for it, here is a complete home server build, in an hour and a half. Strip out the funny stuff, and once you are used to the concepts, you can have a secure home server completely installed on your hardware in under an hour.