Monday, March 9, 2015

Creating a Minimalist CentOS Home Server

It's about time I wrote this, so here we go. I built a little NAS/home server over Christmas time a few months ago. It's based on a FM2 3.5Ghz dual core, a mATX Gigabyte board with eight Sata3 ports, and currently has three 4TB hard drives. I've been jumping between what OS to run on it for a while: first it had Arch, then some Debian, FreeBSD and now here we are at CentOS.

Why? Arch was stable but for fear of things going bad (Arch is not meant to be a server), I switched to Debian which had consistent issues with full network bandwidth causing the Ethernet driver to crash. I had high hopes for BSD then realized they dont support XFS anymore which means I couldn't mount my data drives. So here goes CentOS.

While this is meant for CentOS, most commands are similar and software names are the same, so it can be used as reference for other systems.