Server 2008 for home server... Opinions please.

[biggyk]

Hope this is the right place to post this


Just set up server 2008 r2 on a older box I had that I was using for a few things. Tried Linux but became tThanks of a pain for such simple tasks. Here is what I'm using it for.

Csgo server
Mumble server
File/backup
Media server?

My main concern was for media server to stream to few devices in the house. I was thinking plex. Does anyone have any other ways I can go about it.

Thankd

 

[Shadowjk]

Not sure what opinions you want. All I can say is that you don't need server 2008 R2 to complete your desired tasks. Any basic Windows client OS should work.

EDIT: It should be noted that Windows Server OS's are enterprise standards therefore a lot of home license applications will not install unless it is open source. You will need to purchase enterprise licenses of software for them to be installed on the server. This is particularly important with Anti-Virus solutions.

Josh

 

[biggyk]

It's a core 2 duo with 2gigs ram. I tired xubuntu because it was low on resources and had problems with samba a day also remote desktop was a pain. and figured server 2008 could help in that department. How long is xp supported for?

With a media server. I just wanted to know if plex is the way to go or something else.

 

[Shadowjk]

XP Support ends April 2014.

As for a media server, it will depend on what you wish to stream the media to. If you intend to use XP then you may find incompatibility issues if using any native media sharing. Plex seems like a good application however I don't use it and have not tested it at all.

Josh

 

[mtp]

You can use 2008R2 as a home server and run plex. I have used 2008 r2 as my home server for the past 2 or 3 years and it works extremely well. However, Do I recommend doing so? NO! as a general answer.

It is a server operating system and is designed to run background services and not as a console. If you are planning to also use it as a console, be prepared for a lot of work to get it working. The only real exception that I see (and was my case) is if you need something that requires a server os.

I am running server 2008 r2 because i wanted to combine my mediaserver and exchange servers into a single machine to reduce my energy bills and not have 2 machines going 24 7. It is impossible to run exhange on win 7 so I HAD to do it on server 2008. It took days of tweaking to get all of the mediacenter apps and services running correctly on the server os (especially the mediacenter ... had lots of problems with video) also there are no bda drivers (they can be added) so streaming tv is not easy.

Do it on win 7 everything will be much easier.

 

[mtp]

Also, I was never able to get 100% satisfactory results with plex on server 2008 r2. It was very resource intensive and didn't always give great results with some of my devices. (things may have improved over the past 2 years).