Help with home fileserver

[Dharok]

Basically I've got an old machine laying about, suitable enough to use as a home fileserver. Now, how do I go about setting this up?

Am I right in saying I need to install MS Windows Server 2003, and then VMware to remotely control the machine? As I would like to be able to use the machine, just by having my ethernet and power cable in.

Is there any guides out there on how to do this? Can anyone run me through?

Am I even going about this correctly?!

Help is much appreciated!

 

[FrenchTart]

Am I right in saying I need to install MS Windows Server 2003, and then VMware to remotely control the machine? As I would like to be able to use the machine, just by having my ethernet and power cable in.

Not really...

You can install whatever OS you like. And you wouldn't use VMWare to remote-admin the mation as that's not what VMWare does.

Assuming by "file server" you just mean a dump for files for access over the network, it's simplest to just stick Windows XP on there and then either use remote desktop or a VNC server/client to remote admin. Use windows filesharing to share the files.

Whilst not the most elegant solution, it's by far the easiest.

Also, don't forget to disable keyboard error reporting in the BIOS.

 

[wij]

Another good and reasonably simple to set up and run option is something like FreeNAS.

The user sees it just as a computer on the network that once set up they can connect to once it has been configured just like any other network share and it is managed through a web browser.

As it runs on a very cut down BSD install it is IMO a bit more robust than using something like a plain vanilla XP install.

You could also look at something like Windows Home Server if you wanted a bit more of an easy option but I think you may need to check the hardware requirements for that as they are a bit higher than you might expect.

I would also consider how you are going to configure your physical storage, do you know if your motherboard has any onboard RAID controllers? If so buying 3 cheapish hard drives and setting up Raid5 can give you good redundancy and a bit of peace of mind if like me you're a bit lazy when it comes to backing things up properly!

 

[J.B]

unless you have a copy of server lying around its not worth going and getting it just for file sharing. As said you could use any OS, XP if its easiest for you, or a Linux distribution would do the job and just share the files over your network.
Then map them on the machines you want to access them on.
Dont forget to consider some sort of backup as well as redundancy against hardware failures like a RAID.
Dont know where you got VMware from, not used for remote connection at all.

 

[Cybergangster]

I'm guessing you meant to say VNC rather than VMWare?

As said above, FreeNAS or a Linux distro would be a more robust option for OS. I'm no Linux techy but I'm using FreeNAS and found the set up process very straight forward.

 

[Skidilliplop]

Linux is probably the easiest route to go. XP is easy on the face of it but if you want to control access to the shares linux is actually easier, it's also less vulnerable to viruses and spyware that might get plopped into the network shares and won't chew up resources you're not using. For example you don't need the GUI when you're not working on the server, so you can shut down X server (display manager) and the system reverts to commandline and frees up lots of memory for other things.
Samba stuff i think is already installed by default on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (which would be obvious choice for a beginner) so you just create a folder add the user accounts and start sharing them.