With the rapid development of the internet and increasing bandwidth, people’s demands for the internet are no longer limited to just browsing. The need for home servers has also become more prominent. Apart from spending a lot of money on ready-made NAS servers, building your own machine as a server offers better cost-effectiveness and expandability than buying a NAS. Today, let’s explore how to set up a home server.

First, let’s take a look at the configuration I built, with an overall price not exceeding 1000, for your reference:

1. Motherboard: Lenovo J2900 m-atx type, with 1 memory slot and 2 msata. It can be concluded that it is a second-hand disassembled motherboard. The reason for buying it is that the condition is good and the cost-performance ratio is high. The performance of J2900 is more than enough for a home NAS. If high performance and high stability are required, consider using J3455 with an all-solid-state motherboard.

2. Memory: 8G. There’s nothing more to say; low power consumption is a hard requirement for home servers, and it’s important enough to be repeated three times.

3. Hard Drive: 2T

4. Power Supply: Lenovo 65W Adapter

System Architecture:

Main system: Windows 2008 + Hyper-V

The reason for using Windows 2008 is stability; the later generations of server operating systems seem to be less satisfactory (I have not used Windows Server 2016 yet, so I don’t know how it performs).

After installing antivirus software on Windows, antivirus software for server operating systems is usually paid and quite expensive. After some trials, I chose Norton Endpoint (naturally free! Who would pay for the paid ones?).

Next, enable the Hyper-V service, and you can explore the vast ocean. I have set up a total of three servers on Hyper-V, and I will share the specific server systems and the services running on them:

1. CentOS 7 (providing stable basic services): Mainly includes KMS (a tool for activating Microsoft systems and Office, the latest version supports activation for Windows 10 + Office 2019), FRP (a tool for penetrating internal networks),

SOCKS5 proxy server, ONLYOFFICE server (online Office server), MySQL server……

2. U-NAS, a free and open-source NAS server based on Debian Linux, is undoubtedly the best alternative to Black群晖. It can run NextCloud, Media Center, and a bunch of home applications.

3. CentOS 7 (for testing): This server is used for testing software, essentially acting as a guinea pig.

Of course, the above three systems initially do not have a backend management interface, so I also installed Webmin + BT panel for backend configuration management.

This is the overall hardware and software framework of a home server that I built myself. Interested friends can follow me, and I will gradually share the entire process later.

If you want to receive real-time updates, you can also follow my public account “51 Electronic Club”.