ok so my dad bough a building and the old owner left a nearly empty server rack case in there, i wanted to know how much money (GBP) would i be looking at spending to setup a server for his unit or for our home network? i know the extream basics of servers and networking but im really uncertain on what im doing with setting this up, thanks.
Well it depends what you want to serve.
A basic file server for home use can be as little as the price of some old hardware and HDDs.
Whilst for a large business it may cost a couple of thousands with the use of multi-port NICs and RAID cards.
Give me an idea of what you want to do.
just files, so we can put like steam on there and use it for everyone, or like photos music videos, no glenfield(If your know were that is), so should i just forget the server rack and just get an old pc and a couple of hdd and an ssd?
That's possible. There's fancier ways of doing it, but the most basic file server can be done by just putting in one or more (preferably NAS grade) hard drives, RAID them if you want, and make shared folders to share across your network. You don't even need an SSD for the server OS.
If you want to learn more about servers, go ahead and get a 1U or 2U server and rackmount it.
Look at FreeNAS and NAS4Free. They are OS's based around file sharing and have lots of other little features. They can also be run off of a 1GB usb drive to allow all HDD capacity to be for storage.
If you are going to use an old PC, do look at getting an extra NIC or Dual NIC. Just so if one user is accessing the server it doesn't bottleneck and slow down.