I’ve run my own home server for ten years now – starting with Red Hat then moving to FreeBSD – and I’ve tried to sell (as in: convince – no money involved) many technophiles gadget-lover friends to do like me, take an old PC and transform it to a home server.

While they all liked what they saw at my home all but one shied away and kept having their photos, videos, music and documents on their local box (not even a RAID – the typical backup is a USB drive!).

The most “advanced” are now moving from the USB drive to the NAS. Usually one of the Western Digital MyBook. Again, they all understand the DRM stuff and why these tools restrict their freedom, but it does not seem enough of an argument for them to consider free alternatives – neither the DIY that I’m still running nor slightly less polished products from less known brands.

The inevitable reality is that the majority of people are all busy with other things and want a simple turnkey solution that just works. Such a solution can build re-using components from the professional tools but will be inevitably perceived as “crippled” from a professional or do-it-yourselfer perspective. It’s very difficult to satisfy both markets with a single solution. There is a nice term for this in German: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eierlegende_Wollmilchsau

As for the managing interface, as a DIY I did help myself with webmin in the beginning. Over time I became proficient enough at the CLI that I now barely use webmin – mainly when I don’t have SSH access to the box. Still, at times I am envious of the good web-based configuration interfaces (such as those in internet routers) which could make the admin life easier.

In case anyone makes the same mistake I did, the quote marks in the instructions are angled, so if you copy/paste into the script it doesn’t work. Took me a while to figure that one out.

Here’s some more MoinMoin related usefulness…

http://www.le-web.org/2008/10/09/how-to-remove-old-revisions-in-moinmoin-wiki/

Cheers.

Also the following two by Laurence Lessig are worth reading:
The Future of Ideas
Free Culture

Andrew