NAS or Server

[RedCOMET]

Is it possible to build your own NAS?
If not what would be the easiest and best way to build a file server.

Char

 

[mcveigh]

for a cheap file server.

1) any old PC (pentium or better would be nice)
2) big enough hard drive
3)Linux/*BSD/ any kind
4) SAMBA if you want to server file space to windows.

I'd reccomend, a 300MHZ or better cpu, raid 1 or 5, ide or scsi hard drives as needed/available.

 

[Oaf357]

mcveigh is right.

If it's for the home you could even just use Windows and partition off a share.

For commercial use though I would highly recommend Linux and Samba.

 

[Buddha Bart]

If it's for the home you could even just use Windows and partition off a share.

For commercial use though I would highly recommend Linux and Samba.

Woah. I'd reccomend the exact opposite. For home use Samba is really handy, but for commercial use its not worth supporting the extra OS, all the extra configuration, and the risk of the next service pack or hotfix breaking compatibility.

bart

 

[mcveigh]

Originally posted by: Buddha Bart

If it's for the home you could even just use Windows and partition off a share.

For commercial use though I would highly recommend Linux and Samba.

Woah. I'd reccomend the exact opposite. For home use Samba is really handy, but for commercial use its not worth supporting the extra OS, all the extra configuration, and the risk of the next service pack or hotfix breaking compatibility.

bart

while yes it is another OS to learn, samba is stable and often outperforms windows as a file server. and service packs are known to break many applicatinos besides samba.

 

[RedCOMET]

THanks for the imput. Where can I obtain SAMBA or read up about. I
|'m kinda of new to the whole server thing, and was thinking about building one that can be used at home and from abroad.

 

[Oaf357]

I'm thinking service packs isn't the right term for Linux/SAMBA upgrades. Patches, yes. So for commercial use you would use a Windows 98 PC with file sharing over Linux and SAMBA? If so I pity your network. But, the fact you would call for a file server of upmost complexity (for non-power users) for the home is beyond me.

How interesting.

 

[mcveigh]

Originally posted by: Oaf357
I'm thinking service packs isn't the right term for Linux/SAMBA upgrades. Patches, yes. So for commercial use you would use a Windows 98 PC with file sharing over Linux and SAMBA? If so I pity your network. But, the fact you would call for a file server of upmost complexity (for non-power users) for the home is beyond me.

How interesting.

service packs are from MS, they often break many programs and sometimes screw up connections w/ samba.
i'm not sure what you mean by

commercial use you would use a Windows 98 PC with file sharing over Linux and SAMBA?

the nice thing about linux is you don't have to pay for it. so if you have an older PC you can setup linux w/samba as anice little windows flie server.

find out more samba info

also search for samba in the forums here

 

[mrbass]

How many people we talking about? We have about 150 soon about 200. Anyway we bought a MaxAttach for $4200 over a year ago and it works great. I have samba on our intranet server (redhat) and for enginnering cd-rom archive and also on one other one print server (sme/e-smith). At the time we bought it I really wanted to go with linux.

At the time there was no reliable journaling file system. Now there's ext3. The biggest was backup program. I must've tried well over 8 or so backup programs. The one I like the best was novabackup or something like that can't remember exactly the name. The cheapest we found NAS server that had a SCSI port for tape backup and was on linux was $13,000..(sorry ain't doing 200GB or whatever backup over the LAN). Maxattach is win 2000 and we use the built-in backup which suffices for our needs. No need for $8,000 backup software. I use tar for backup our linux email server and it works great since we only have to restore once in a blue moon a mailbox here or there.

The one we like was $25,000 connex since it had snapshots. Network Appliance came in and it was like $30,000 to $40,000. Oh yea, we toured Dot Hill Corporation and their solution was well over $100,000 (they laughed at us...but at least we're still in business...so are they but they're way down).

So it's our only windows 2000 server out there (no crap CAL license crap to deal with). It is a litte slow when I transfer gigs of data upload to the raid 5 since it's software raid and only a Celeron 500Mhz I think. We have a SLDT ($6,000) 110/220GB tapes and it works great attached to the maxattach.
Check out 4300
Maxattach 4300


if this is for just a few people or at home then definitely go with samba on linux.