Can this server be made and how?

[Hyudra]

My friend asks:
Can me and you make a computer which is a central server, network DSL and mirror all networked computers to one drive on the server?

Big money into setting this up. Now I believe dell would have something, but what am I looking for? And how hard would it be to set up. Thx for any help. PMs on this would be nice too. Thx.

He also says it's a for a 5 computer network with DSL hookup.

 

[flood]

norton ghost has support for mirroring via a network connectoin. This will work if you want to do periodic mirrors. if you want a realtime mirror, thats a little more complicated.

 

[flood]

err...
just had an idea...
the server maps the drives of the networked computers. then use fsutil (comes with xp, but works in 2k) to create hardlinks for all the remote files so there is a local entry of each.

 

[JackBurton]

Yes, you can do it (kind of) and it isn't that hard...well, if you know what you're doing. Setup a Windows 2000 domain controller. This server will also be a proxy server, so install whatever proxy software you'd like (MS ISA or Proxy 2.0 work GREAT). You can also set up the server to act as a RIS (Remote Installation Server) server. With a RIS server you can image client's machines and store the images on the server. If a workstation's HD fails, you can boot off the NIC, pick the image you want to download and BAM, your client's machine will be restored. Imaging is not quite like mirroring but its as close as you're going to get. You're not going to use a 100Mbps network connection to mirror HDs. You can image the workstations once, and then have a tape backup system installed on the server and set it up to backup the workstations at a certain part of the day, preferably at night when no one is working.

Edit: Normally a proxy server should be a stand alone server but since you want ONE server, I'd install a proxy on it and put a router right in front of it to give you that extra protection. The proxy would be more used to control your user's access to the net.