New Project for my Network

Hardware Hub Networking
1

Hello once again! Going to need some input for this project that I plan on doing once my 2TB drive comes in. The system I'll be using for this project is Problem Child (Dell XPS Gen 4).

So, the project I'm going to be starting is a server which I'll be using like a rescue software similar to Hirens (to use with PXE boot) and as a dedicated back-up server for all the systems on my network. Right now I'm still waiting for my Hitachi Ultrastar 2TB drive to come in which is expected to be here Monday. Lucky me won't have my main laptop, but thankfully I'll have my Dell Latitude E4200 to use for this project. What would I do without a laptop XD, I'd go bonkers! I do plan on using a Linux based OS, seeing I don't feel like using a mouse, seeing the PS/2 Mouse port doesn’t work.

Intel Pentium 4 @3.4 Ghz
2GB RAM
2TB HDD (won't be in till sometime next week)

Criteria
Rescue PXE Server (so I can just PXE boot instead of using a flash drive)
Backup server for all systems for Image Storage and a failsafe for my main server.

This will be a very interesting project for me to tackle. Looking forward to it, will probably be asking for a lot of help on here. Let me know what you guys think of this project!

2

I've set up a pxe server on Ubuntu server before, it has clonezilla and dban and a couple of other tools like that. It works pretty well but some things are much harder to get working with it than others.

If this is going to be a single disk system you might want to look at using btrfs as the file system as even though you won't be able to recover anything, because it stores checksums it will atleast tell you if a file has become corrupt (if you run a periodic (weekly, monthly, etc.) scrub) so you can just create a new backup to replace one of it goes bad. That way you won't get a nasty surprise if you go to restore a backup and find out its corrupt.