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need help with server setup

B

brock

Senior member
i'm not a complete idiot, but i'm venturing into some new ground with our computers at the office.

the background: we have a small office (6 people total) in a recording studio. we keep our current songs on a 120gb IDE drive attached to one of the computers on the network and share it to the other users. nothing fancy, but it works.

the plan: we just purchased a new dell poweredge 600sc preinstalled with 2 120gb drives. i want to move something more stable than our current setup (we haven't had any problems yet, but i want to be sure). the idea was to set up this server with linux/samba and share the files the way we've been doing it (all the clients are using windows 2000 or xp). trouble is, i know very little about linux and need some help conceptualizing the whole thing.

basically, i've got 3 120gb drives and a good box that i can use as a file server. what would you do?

ideally, i'd like something that will allow us to be able to listen to our songs off the fileserver concurrently and that would make backups either automated or very simple.

thanks for any suggestions.
 
If your space requirements are under 120GB, I would use one drive as the share and have it automatically back up to the other drive. Either Windows or Linux will work for this. Although the Windows solution is an easier setup if you are used to it. Plus the automatic backup is easy too.
 
well, we're quickly outgrowing our 120gb drives, but it should be fine for now...i'm trying to look towards the future too...
 
It would be easy to do with Samba. When it's all set up right, all of the Win machines just access it like any other Win server. You'll need to learn some Linux basics etc first, but it shouldn't take you more than a month to have everything set up how you want it.

I also reccomend some kind of tape backup on a regular schedule.
 
> want to move something more stable than our current setup

Sounds like your major concern is 'stability'.
Where in the current setup is not stable enough? OS? Hardware?
What kind of 'stablility' are you looking for: data safety or data availability ?

Linux/Samba should certainly do the job for you.
Setup is the easy part, performance tuning might be an issue for newbies.

What sound format do you store on the server ? How many MBytes per second?
> ideally, i'd like something that will allow us to be able to listen to our songs off the fileserver concurrently.

Can 6 persons listen to 6 different songs at the same time in the current setup ?

You might get more help from Samba users' forum.

Start setting up Linux and Samba now, you can get both for free.
Do some test and come back when you have problems.

 
thanks for the input.

stability - i'm just nervous about windows and multi-user access. i feel like running something of a server would provide more stability and allows for future expandability. data safety is the most important aspect to me.

we store WAVs on the server, but i'm also looking at mirroring our catalog as low & high quality MP3s.
 
Originally posted by: brock
thanks for the input.

stability - i'm just nervous about windows and multi-user access. i feel like running something of a server would provide more stability and allows for future expandability. data safety is the most important aspect to me.

we store WAVs on the server, but i'm also looking at mirroring our catalog as low & high quality MP3s.
Click to expand...


I'm gonna say, Set up a machine with windows 2000 server, make sure it supports USB 2.0 or firewire, then plug in external drives. easiest way to upgrade your drives. Just plug it in and go.
 
Some hardware thoughts...
WAV files may be a bit demanding on your bandwidth since they may be at around 3-15MB/sec for high quality. There is no reason to store the music in WAV format for listening IMO. To work in and edit is a different matter but for listening you should covert to 128-160kbit MP3's and make an MP3 volume. 6 people concurrently trying to access a WAV at 3 MB/sec would mean your server and network have to send out 10-25MB/sec to 6 different users. Thats alot of bandwidth (1MB = 8mbit). I think that poweredge 600 comes with a Gigabit NIC but you will have to run a line to a switch with a gigabit uplink. If people are even moving around uncompressed audio just to work on, you will want your network to be able to give them near saturation of their 100mbit (~10MB/sec) NICs from a gigabit NIC on your server. Otherwise a 300-500+MB uncompressed audio session may take them several minutes to add or remove from the server.

You may also want to consider a RAID 5 array for faster access with redundency. I also don't know if you system can handle 6 simultaneous streams of that magnitude though. I wouldn't think 6 is too much of a problem but the sizes of data you are talkig about can be really large. How good could the I/O handling on a $400 server be? 😛

Something like Quantum's Snapserver NAS would probably be your easiest bet, but they are pretty limited otherwise. I think you're on the right track with a real server, albeit a small one. It will give you much more options and growth potential.

btw backups are pretty easy. There are many automated backup programs to choose from and many methods of backing up. If you are dealing with uncompressed audio (WAV, AIFF) though, you may want to consider some large and fast tapes like DLT. Those can get quite expensive but what else is going to quickly and effetively backup hundreds of gigs of data on a scheduled basis?

anyways I am talking too much about something I have been out of the loop on.
I just thought you may want to consider some of those hardware obstacles first.
 
thanks for the good info there. i completely agree with you about the WAV files being a bit overkill and have actually been planning a way to mirror the entire catalog as MP3s. (detecting new songs and automating the process is a bit confusing). better yet, with MP3s, i'll be able to access our catalog remotely (we all do a lot of traveling, so this would be quite useful).

i was thinking about using RAID 5, but after looking at the costs of purchasing a compatible controller for the 600SC, it hardly seems worth it. i might be better off just mirroring the drives in case one of them fails -- strictly in terms of what's easiest RIGHT NOW. i also imagine if i'm using MP3s, the efficiency increase would be negligible...although i don't have any knowledge or experience to back that statement up.

i'm just trying to make everything simple, for both my sanity and the rest of the company. i don't really have time (or skill) to be a full-time IT admin, so i'm trying to figure out the best option to provide what we need at low maintenance levels.
 
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