What am I missing? Small office setup

[IBM]

We've got a small office which has a couple of PC desktops, couple of PC laptops, a Mac G5 & laptop...for ages I've been banging on about the need for a central file server, and we've finally got a bit of cash for some spare kit.

So I'm looking for a system to operate as a file server and a print server, and if anyone else has any advice on what I should be getting (OS, hardware & software) then feel free, but what I'm also looking for is whether I'm missing anything. What else could a system be used for in this setting? I thought a server for hosting, but didn't want to mix a file server with anything remotely accessible to the outside world.....

There were some posts in the bargain section about a NAS setup with print server tech built in...would this work?

Any help would be appreciated, as allocated funds have a tendency to get drained away if they're not used up quickly enough.

[nichomach]

Web hosting's probably best handled by an external company. More reliable, and won't goose your internet connection if you get a lot of hits.

How's your email currently handled? You could always use something like SBS and handle mail and calendaring that way, unless you already have an arrangement in place to host it that's satisfactory.

If all you're doing is file and print, then don't waste money on dual processors and stuff like that - and you can get most of the advantages with dual-core anyway. You won't need huge amounts of RAM, but a good fast disk subsystem'd be handy. Look for something with good warranty cover. Make sure you have a good backup strategy in place - and the hardware to support it. Something like a Poweredge 830, Pentium D 3GHz, 2GB memory, maybe 4 SATA drives hanging off one of the CERC RAID controllers in RAID5, tape drive of whatever flavour. If you can stretch to it, get a remote management card; I spec them as standard on our kit, and in combination with a VPN connection into the office, they've saved me a lot of weekends - basically, you can do anything that you could if you were sat in front of the machine. Shut down, start up, warm resets, unkludging your server when you told it to shut down or start but it's just hung, that sort of thing.

Unless you need a database server, SBS2003 standard would give you file, print, mail (via Exchange) shared fax, Sharepoint, quite a lot really. The Premium throws ISA Server and SQL Server into the mix, but for that size of network I think that'd be overkill.

If you don't need mail on the server, then your choice of Windows Server 2003 or Linux using Samba, I guess. Server 2003's probably easier to administer, but there's ways around that. I saw quite a nice GUI driven suite for managing Samba servers reviewed in PC Pro recently, I'll see if I can find the details.

edit: Centeris Likewise, that's the bunny - might be useful. Got a decent writeup.

[alsenior]

i'd go with the above hardware but i would probably choose linux if your up for a bit of learning.also you could try build somthing yourself with the above spec as it might be a bit cheaper but you will endup doing all of the suport your self.if your using linux try the following pakages

samba
cups
squid
my sql
mailman

there are tutorials for all of these also cent os is very good as it is a rebranded redhat enterpirse linux but it is distrobuted for free. it is tghe hsame as the redhat offerings on the server conf page

[IBM]

Nichomach .... I wish I had the budget for that setup! It's not likely that my budget is going to exceed £600....and before you tell me that saving money now is going to cost me later, I know, I've been saying that for months, but I'm not going to get any more cash.

We don't need mail capabilities, which is currently handled by brinkster as is our hosting solutions. The idea of having a local server just seemed like a nice bonus.

Unfortunately I'm snowed under with all the other aspects of the business I have to take care of, and opportunity for learning anything is limited. I'd like to have a look at Linux as it's not something I've crossed paths with before, but it's whether I'm going to have the time.

[nichomach]

Is that £600 inc VAT or ex? £600 is light, very light, even for a workgroup server, and if you're not going open source, damned near impossible; Server 2003 isn't free. A NAS box may be your only realistic option at that price point.

[ultim8um]

For that many PC's and with that budget... Look at this: http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=359341

You can put a SATA hard drive in there and add an external SATA (eSATA) for RAID 1 / backup...

Not ideal but it will do what you want in the short term...

[IBM]

What's the downside to simply buying a cheapish PC and simply networking it, providing access to the drive as storage, and runing the printer through that computer?

If I went down this root, is there an easy way to share that PCs IIS across the network to use it as a development server? I'd probably want to install SQL Server on there too but leave it accessible to other computers on the network....is this going to cause me problems?