making my win98se pc a server?

[aUt0eXebat]

I dont think that its possible to set a Windows 98 SE OS to be a server is it? A server as in a home LAN...

 

[sohcrates]

sure you can. if you're talking about using the 98 box as a firewall or whatever. you can run programs like wingate or even put in two ethernet card and use internet connection sharing to make it your server. the options are limitless. the reason most people DON'T use win98 as a server is because it's UNSTABLE! but as long as you reboot it enough, it should work fine for ya

 

[cavingjan]

ACtually a striped down version of the 98 OS doesn't do to bad. We had one system like that at work. One thing I can suggest is to use the task scheduler to have it reboot once a week. Late one night should cover it easy enough but it was stable for about a month at a time. All of our problems on that problem was caused by our backup software. It should work fine for you for a home lan.

 

[BigDady92]

reboot it every day around 3 am. 98 has memory leaks in the OS causing BSOD's if not rebooted everynite..once again 98 is not a networking OS it is a home OS. NT is a networking OS.

 

[BCYL]

Yeah I used to use win98 box as a LAN server before I switched to linux... it would crash every couple of days and have to restart, quite annoying... I am sure there are ways you can make it stable, but Linux is so much better and just as easy to setup!

 

[Hawkeye_(BEL)]

Hmm, I do think people blow the instability of Win98 up too much. I'm running Win98 right now, and it's running as an FTP & webserver, both internaly as to the web. I have an uptime now of 9 days. Remember, this PC is actually used besides being a server (games, MPEG encoding,...).

Granted, Win98 isn't suitable for large corporations, but for home users, it does the job perfectly.

EDIT : For the original poster. Win98 doesn't include server software by default. But there's plenty good freeware software you can use. For FTP & webserving, I use xitami (http://www.xitami.com/). You can also use several other tools. Like Guildftpd for FTP-serving and the Win32 Apache port. I prefer xitami above everything else, since it's lightweight and really easy to set up.

And for internet connection sharing : Win98 SE includes all necessary software by default. If you want to use other tools, nat32 is among the best for Win32. You can find a setup guide right here. I hope this gets you started.