Any sick home server setups out there?

[Katheudo]

Just to give some context I am currently living at home as I am lucky enough to live next to a university and study from home, however this meant living with parents. I currently own a Dell 2950 R2 which cost me £89 and a Dell SC1425 which cost me £29, got some good deals eBay. My parents moan when I have them on because of the electric they use, and I want to put their power to good use. My parents also won't let me move my servers in the backroom because they think I will run them all the time, as currently they are in my bedroom, and these servers do create huge amounts of noise and I like my sleep

Anyway, do you have a home server setup? For example I found this guy here http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r18914763-Just-moved-home-pics-of-2nd-bedroom-aka-server-room who has a overkill server setup at home. Tell me your home server stories?

[vanity]

Would also love to hear about some of the other members setups.

I have a Dell T510 and I got lucky getting a server rack off of craigslist about a year ago. Since then I have acquired a pretty decent firewall. I have Frontier FiOS (which I know is only to my door) but since I built my house I had the builders wire each room with Cat6 Ethernet to where I would keep my rack. I have a smaller UPS, and a dedicated circuit for the rack, and I am installing Splunk on the server to do log analysis. That pretty much sums up my home server setup.

-V

[techb]

I use mine as a media center. It is attached to the living room TV with a few external hdds. I also have my irc client running on it, so I can just ssh into it from my laptop and still be logged into irc all the time.

I don't have to worry about the electric bill because I pay it.

[proxx]

Due to power concerns I decided to kill my old AMD box with a lot of hunger.
Just this week I swapped the board with some minitx board and some kinda easy on power intel CPU (2x2.2ghz)
I got some old but industrial quality flash drives(very easy on power usuage) which are used for OS and as a cache disk for my squid.
Speaking of which basically it's a DHCP/webproxy/cachingDNSserver for now.
It will be a fileserver and probably download server aswel as soon as I hook up some neat RAID configuration.
Other than that , I am not too concerned with security apart from the regular firewalling and stuff.

I could suggest:
Sickbeard/couchpotato/headphones for auto downloading series/movies/music (torrent or ns).
Squid , thats webbrowsing on steroids, nicely filtered ads so no client side nonsense , caching gives massive speed increase on loading times.
*some other stuff here, brain refuses cooperation*

[Katheudo]

Nice. I only used my servers when I had them running as a TeamSpeak 3 server, file server, a couple of game servers and sometimes used them for providing evidence for uni work like server configuration and website development.

Also how much are your servers costing you to run on a monthly basis?

[proxx]

I actually have a supermicro server lying around but it costs way too much to have it running, just not worth it.

[dimi]

I have a supermicro with vsphere 6 on it. I am using it for testing. At first it freezed a lot, changed the ssd for a normal hdd. Seems to go better now.not in a rack. Stocked in the basement. I power it on with ipmi. It isnt active all the time.