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Thread: Need help designing home file server

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    Need help designing home file server

    I would like to build a home file server that could also handle print server duties and I have some minor exposure to Unix from a previous job and would like to try my hand at Linux.
    I would like some help, please, with determining some minimum specs for the machine.



    omega

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    Comfortably Numb directhex's Avatar
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    Re: Need help designing home file server

    as a bare minimum, i'd suggest a processor, some memory, and some disk. and some kind of motherboard.

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    The late but legendary peterb - Onward and Upward peterb's Avatar
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    Re: Need help designing home file server

    You can run a linux machine on a relatively low spec machine - I run Fedora on a Socket A machine built about 4 years ago (built at the time specifically as a learning machine - it now acts as a web and file server) I have also riun it on an 800Mhz Celeron - it does get a bit sluggish though.

    So min spec for processor - 1.6Ghz AMD or Intel equivalent.
    Ram - if you are going to use a Gui, then you need 512Mbyte minimum (you can run less - I run t on a plaptop with just over 300, but as Ram is pretty cheap, go for 512 or 1G.

    hard drive - depends on the data, but for the OS, you need about 25Gb - so if you get a 250 or 500G drive you will have loads of data space.

    Graphics - nothing special - a low end £30 nvidia or ATI will do the job.

    I used an Asus terminator for my 'learning machine' with integrated sound and video and Lan - it was ideal, and you may want to look at that option as a fairly cheap solution. The only drawback is the limited expansion - but with onboard sound, video and Lan, there isn't really much requirement for anything else. My set up consumes about 100Watts.

    You need to consider the distro. Under the skin, they are similar, and if you are looking at a Gui, there are two main choices - Gnome and Kde (there are others.

    Ubantu is the current 'flavour of the month' - it has some lively support forums and a good repository of applications which are (I read - I haven't tried it myself) easy to download.

    I use Fedora - again a good set of repositories - set up is good if you want the Fedora standard set up - can be a little tricky if you depart from that. The standard repository is excellent, and there are some third party repositories for software that Fedora don't consider open source or unencumbered (such as mp3 codecs)

    Other option is to get some live CDs of severalf distros and try them before installing to see what you prefer.

    Once installed, setting up as a file server using Samba is reasonably straightforward, but there is a shedload of help and experience both hear and on the web in general - Google really is your friend.

    Once you have selected a Distro, I STRONGLY suggest you invest in a good book specific to your distro. O'Reilly publish some good ones, but a search on Amazon will through up lots more. The 'Bible' series are pretty good.

    As your expertise increases, you will venture into the command line inyterface, and that is where the fun begins. At that point I would recommend "Linux in a Nutshell" (again published by O'Reilly) and an excellent non-distro specific guide to the command line applications.

    Good luck!
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    Re: Need help designing home file server

    I don't know about Linux distro's, but spec wise you need a fair CPU speed and a good amount of RAM if you want 2+ computers to transfer at fast speeds. With RAM being so cheap I would get 1GB at least. CPU a single core will get you by, but if you have more computers a dual core would be better. 2.5GHz+ single core should be good if only a few computers are accessing it.

    Alex

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    Re: Need help designing home file server

    A dual core would be major overkill for a fileserver unless you're dealing with 100 clients, I doubt the OP will be dealing with that many connections or afford the storage I/O system required to keep up.

    Ideal minimum specs, CPU: i686 or better (Pentium 2), 128MB or more, 6GB IDE HDD or (probably much, much) more, and some kind of PCB thingy to connect them all together.
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    Re: Need help designing home file server

    it really depends on what you want to use the machine for?

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    Re: Need help designing home file server

    He says a print server, so mostly just taking print jobs from computers at home, writting documents out to a spool and issuing the print job to the connected printer(s) from the spool. So it's basically just a simple fileserver with some automation.
    Quote Originally Posted by Agent View Post
    ...every time Creative bring out a new card range their advertising makes it sound like they have discovered a way to insert a thousand Chuck Norris super dwarfs in your ears...

  8. #8
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    Re: Need help designing home file server

    {start shameless plug}
    The kit I dismantled and am flogging in this thread made a stonking file server for home use. It even did a spot of webserving when I needed a test rig.

    Fileservers don't need anywhere near the grunt of pretty much any other server role. They just need a decent amount of reliable storage (note: definition of "decent" can vary massively dependent on the situation) and a reasonable backup solution. Resilience is nice (in form of a RAID array), but so long as your backups are good and you can live with a little downtime it's not always necessary.

    {end shameless plug}

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    Re: Need help designing home file server

    I got myself a home file server and recently ported from FreeNAS to Windows Home Server (I know sounds mad) and im actualy loving it

    Dont need hardware too strong, the emphasis should be on storage.

    Hardware Splash is selling is perfect, infact i was going to buy it but won a similar ebay auction and thus couldnt. {continued the plugging}

    Oh and i went to Windows Home Server mainly because of it's compatablity with everything from go, and it also syncs with my PDA properly.

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    Re: Need help designing home file server

    I guess my question was wrongly phrased.

    What kind of files?

    if you're backing up HD movies at nearly 20Gb a pop each and also a music collection to fill an 80Gb ipod then the spec of the machine suddenly changes...

    if you're not then pretty much anything will do!

  11. #11
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    Re: Need help designing home file server

    Quote Originally Posted by MarkyP View Post
    I guess my question was wrongly phrased.

    What kind of files?

    if you're backing up HD movies at nearly 20Gb a pop each and also a music collection to fill an 80Gb ipod then the spec of the machine suddenly changes...

    if you're not then pretty much anything will do!
    Not really, the storage aspect changes, but that was covered earlier in the thread. You don't suddenly need a dual/quad core and heaps of RAM just because the volume of data that the server is to serve grows, just more disk space.

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    The late but legendary peterb - Onward and Upward peterb's Avatar
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    Re: Need help designing home file server

    You might want to read the thread started by Sim

    http://forums.hexus.net/operating-sy...ileserver.html
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    Re: Need help designing home file server

    Quote Originally Posted by Splash View Post
    Not really, the storage aspect changes, but that was covered earlier in the thread. You don't suddenly need a dual/quad core and heaps of RAM just because the volume of data that the server is to serve grows, just more disk space.
    errrr, yes it does...

    especially if you want to watch those HD movies from the said file server without any pauses or stuttering...

  14. #14
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    Re: Need help designing home file server

    sorry, are you talking about a streaming media server? The decoding *should* be done client side if this is a *file* server

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    Re: Need help designing home file server

    yeah, but getting those bits to the client machine needs horsepower not just space on a disk...

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    Re: Need help designing home file server

    to have sufficient throuput you need a bit of oomph and some memory to manoeuvre in.

    I don't mean the meanest, badest processor with 16Gb of memory but it really does depend on what he wants to store and how he wants to access it as to what spec is required.

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