Dedicated >open source< network storage OS?

[Sunner]

You could always try Fedora.
If you really don't wanna get your hands dirty it's a fairly decent option, and it has a built in GUI tool for Samba administration.

Oh and I'll have to agree with Nothinman's first post, I've always been fascinated by how expensive NAS boxes are considering they're nothing but a box full of IDE drives and Windows/Linux/whatever installed.

 

[thirdlegstump]

I'll check out Fedora if I get totally fed up with the current installation. I'm pretty close to getting something working on Debian with Webmin but for some reason, it's not accepting my username/password when I try to mount a Samba share from an XP box. I'm probably doing something wrong here since there were literally millions of options to choose from and I only guessed based on my limited Windows Server experiences.

Also X isn't able to run my laptop's native XGA resolution and instead does 800x600. I think for this particular Thinkpad based on Google searches, it's quite a pain to get it working right. Just my luck! It's a Thinkpad T23 2647-2TU with S3 SuperSavage video.

Yea I agree about the 'appliance NAS' devices which is why I'm investigation going the PC box route although I've had nothing but great success with Snap! servers. Those things are almost perfect in design.

 

[nweaver]

make sure you have set the permissions on the folder at the filesystem level (chmod and chown, chmod 777 should eliminate that, but it should only be used for testing). Make sure you have the Samba user added (smbpasswd -a username) and the user is listed in the share in the smb.conf. I dont' know if it's needed, but I normally restart samba after making mods to it's conf file. (not sure on debian, on my gentoo box it's /etc/init.d/samba restart)

 

[Brazen]

Using Fedora Core 3. All you need is Disc 1. "#" means type this and hit return at the command prompt.

1. Perform a "Server" install and choose "Minimal" packages
2. Log in as root
3. # cd /etc
4. # mv yum.conf yum.conf.original
5. # wget http://www.fedorafaq.org/samples/yum.conf
5a. You need to import GPG keys now, go here: http://www.fedorafaq.org/#gpgsig to see how and which ones.
6. # yum remove stunnel up2date cups bluez
7. # yum install openssl
8. # chkconfig yum on
9. # yum update
10. Reboot with # shutdown -r now
11. Log back on as root
12. # yum --enablerepo=dag install perl-Net-SSLeay
13. # yum --enablerepo=dag install webmin
14. # iptables -F
15. You can now connect to webmin at https://ipaddress:10000
16. In webmin, find the SAMBA module and go from there

Webmin makes things pretty easy. I have not set up SAMBA though, so I don't know if you will need to do something like "yum install samba" before webmin will let you administer it.

Edit: also this leaves your server somewhat unsecured (although no less secure than a typical Windows server, well pre- 2003 SP1 anyway). If you get this to work, I will give more info on locking it down.

 

[drag]

That sort of thing is why I prefer command line to webmin...

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: drag
That sort of thing is why I prefer command line to webmin...

Heh, I tend to prefer CLI simply because it gives you a feel for how things work.
Of course, there are exceptions, for tedious tasks such as setting up DNS records I can do fine with a GUI, and Sun's management apps actually have a little console where they output the commans to run if you wanna do it again.