Running third party apps in openfiler?

[Messiah Khan]

Im considering installing openfiler on my server, but I have a few questions first;

I mainly want my server to act as a fileserver to share all my music, films, isos etc. But at the moment I also use it as a torrentbox to download stuff during the middle of the night and when im at work. Is it possible to run a torrent client (ideally utorrent) on a server running openfiler? As its just a version of Linux im guessing it is possible, but how easy is it and are there better alternatives. Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

 

[Messiah Khan]

...woooosh!

That was the sound of it going over my head. Im pretty much a total noob to linux. What does compiling involve in terms of a Linux install?

 

[Messiah Khan]

Compiling is how software is converted from human-readable code a person wrote to machine-readable instructions called binaries. For the most part you'll need a compiler. GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection, is most common. There may be other prerequisite programs or libraries that you might need as well. You'll download the software you want using something like curl or wget. You'll extract the archive, probably a tar.gz, into a directory. In that directory there will be a file called readme that you should read as it will contain instructions on how to compile that program. The compiler and other bits are usually all called using a scripted build system called Make. You use the make utility on your computer to automatically compile and link the code. A few minutes later it'll spit out a usable binary. You then use Make with a particular flag to install the program system-wide.

Many times, executed as root, it's:
make config
make
make install

Bang, you're done.


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How basic do I need to get? Do you know what Wine is? Do you know what an X server is? Do you know about the CLI or SSH?

Thanks for the explanation. I realise what compiling is in general terms, but why do you have to compile Linux distros and apps? ie, why don't they come in neat little exe files like windows apps?

You need to get quite basic im afraid. I think Wine is for running windows apps in *nix. Am I half right? No idea what X server is, and my knowledge of CLI and SSH stretches as far as believing they are command line programs (And the idea of that scares me somewhat. Im only just beginning to overcome my fear of DOS). So basically talk to me like im a 5 year old.

I've had another idea though, which may be simpler, although more expensive. It is to have a rackmount NAS/SAN running openfiler, then have another cheap 1U rackmount with something like server 2003 running as a general server with utorrent etc. I think this would give more ease of use, although the extra cost of running another server all the time is a downside.

 

[Messiah Khan]

Thanks a lot for that. With things like drivers for graphics cards, raid cards etc etc, would these need to be compiled for integration with a distro like openfiler?