FTP+NAS server

[doanster]

I happen to stumble upon an old PIII machine and a spare 250GB hard drive in the basement. I think together they can be put to good use as a cheap file server.

What kind of operating system and software should I consider if I want NAS and FTP functionality?
(NAS as in me being able to access those files from both my PCs and Macs on the network)

Would it be wise to simply install WinXP on it and share the drive across the network, and then use some free FTP server software for WAN sharing?

Or should I consider, say, a Linux OS such as FreeNAS?

There's so many options out there... no idea where to begin :S

 

[Brazen]

Personally, I have a CentOS file server. I didn't go with FreeNAS because, with a general purpose distro like CentOS, I was able to setup and http server and run torrentflux, so I can download torrent files directly to my file server. One day I would also like to install amule with the web based client, but I tried it once already and couldn't get the web client to work.

Other than that, if all you want is SMB and FTP, I would go with FreeNAS. If for some god-awful reason you decide to use Windows XP, you can use filezilla server on it for ftp or XP does have a built in FTP server that is limited to 10 concurrent client connections.

 

[n0cmonkey]

FreeNAS isn't linux. It's FreeBSD.