A few weeks back, we wrote a piece on building your own file server for home use. In the piece we talked about using it as a media server if you were willing to drop a little extra and pick up a network capable media player, or using it to back up any number of machines on your network. The whole point was to have a file server assembled nice and cheaply without compromising on performance.

Not all servers need to be a monstrous affair...

It’s simple enough stuff, but getting together a server is, after all, a PC build, so there’ll always be ways to get to the heart of things and shear off any excess cost to get right down to the bare bones. When we announced that we’d be running a competition for the best comment on the blog over the course of every month (starting and ending around the 14th of every month), we hadn’t realised that we’d be getting full PC builds as comments, but the build that we’re using for this post came from the comments section on our last post.

It seems that one of our readers, the ever aware Nutterguy, wasn’t suitably impressed by our file server, and decided to see how much it’d cost him to put together his own if he kept everything as tightly reigned in as possible. The result is a solid file server that’ll set you back just under €250.

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When it comes to picking up a PC, we’re massive advocates of the “do it yourself” route. The fact is that just about anyone should be able to put together a machine if they’re given all of the right parts; it’s mostly a question of ‘insert tab A into slot B’ from start to finish. The difficult part tends to be in choosing parts in the first place without going overboard, which is one of the big reasons we’re happy to put together builds on the blog as much as we do.

You'd be surprised how often a little mistake can utterly knacker things...

Still, when it comes to building your own PC, there are a few issues that tend not to come up in many “Build Your Own” articles, but that we do see and hear people talking about a lot. This post is basically just a run down of some really common issues that we encounter that could very well set you back a fairly substantial amount of money if you’re not careful. Some won’t cost a thing no matter how badly they do, but the others… well, let’s just say it’s no walk in the park.

Given that we’ve got our Build Your Own PC classes coming up, we thought it’d be worth a look at some of the little things that can go wrong…

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One of the things that we see asked time and time again with Google Buzz having been launched this week is, “Will Buzz be just another Google Wave?” Sure enough, there seems to be relatively little prominent use of Google’s post-mail client, but that could well be because those who are using Wave are doing so in a fairly quiet, out of the way fashion; Wave is not, by nature, a very public affair.

We like to call it Google Dave

Still, it seems that the vast majority of users who have criticised Google Wave for a total lack of activity have done so after first checking their Wave account (often for the first time after a period of protracted absence) and realised that there was nothing there to demand their attention; it’s very much the same thing as checking an email account you haven’t used in months and expecting it to contain messages for you…

Still, there are those who seem to have found a use for Google Wave outside of the norm, and for those of us who’ve been using it, it’s become a fairly invaluable tool.

Take Notes:

Among the most impressive things I encountered during a recent class on web-based technologies by Mulley Communications[http://mulley.ie/] was a use to which Google Wave was being put by two other attendees sitting in front of me. Indeed, so compelling was this use of Google Wave that it became difficult to focus on much else.

Wave is being seen as increasingly useful for conferences

Essentially, all that was going on was note-taking inside Google Wave, nothing so very shocking about that; it’s a relatively simple arrangement, and one that might even be better handled in Google Docs, given the different formatting options that Google Docs offers. Still, there were some enormous benefits to having multiple editors to a single document in real time, especially when someone is speaking and giving off-the-cuff advice.

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Afternoon folks, we’re delighted to bring you news that we’re looking for some new blood at Komplett as we expand our ‘Build Your Own PC’ classes into full workshops. We’re looking for a teacher for the workshops and are hoping to talk to individuals who are knowledgeable in the areas of computer components and assembly, and who can successfully impart critical parts of this knowledge to complete newbies in the space of a few short hours.

Can you teach novices how to build their own PC? If so, we wanna hear from you.

The workshops will take place during weekends, with a possibility for evening work during the week. Also, candidates will be expected to demonstrate a high theoretical knowledge of and practical abilities in handling computer components prior to employment.

If you think you’d be interested in imparting your PC wisdom you can apply via jobs.ie now.

When we ran our article on setting up your own file server, we ran with the assumption that most people would have an old PC lying around the house, not doing an awful lot, that could be recommissioned as a file server with only minor physical work.

Not all servers need to look quite this scary.

That said, we got a lot of feedback from people asking if we’d put together an article on what hardware we’d use to build a file server as cheaply as practically possible without compromising the machine itself. That’s all this article is going to be, a quick and dirty list of things we’d recommend for anyone building a file server for in their own home.

It’s important to remember when you see these spec that a file server, set up as we’d recommended before, running FreeNAS, shouldn’t necessarily need to be anything particularly powerful. All it needs to be is stable, reliable and (hopefully) cheap enough that you can add some networked storage to your house without breaking the bank.

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One of the products we find sees a lot of traffic is small NAS (Network Attached Storage) setups. Admittedly, they’re a very specific way to get a relatively general piece of work done, but the fact is that buying an independent piece of NAS hardware is, for most people, one of the more expensive ways of getting a healthy block of storage onto a network. It’s significantly cheaper to just rebuild an old machine, throw in a few extra hard drives and set it up as a file server.

Not all file servers look like this... household ones are a lot less monstrous

Some NAS devices do offer pretty attractive extra features, like this AC Ryan PlayOn, which boasts both 1TB of internal storage and the ability to play media directly from the box to an attached display (in HDMI) without needing the intervention of a TV. The fact is that some of our more capable readers would be far better served by simply opting to recommission an older desktop to act as a file server, and it’s a lot easier than you might think.

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