Servers for beginners

[Xenon14]

As you can note, i've been a member from 1999, and although I'm no pundit on computers, i have a lot of breadth in my knowledge of computers, but not a lot of depth...

Lately i've been thinking of setting up a server, but alas I don't know the first thing about servers, other than they tend to run on rally crappy hardware.

so my question is, how do i go about setting up a server? (i'm guessing there are two types; local & net-based, I guess right now I'm more inclined to do a local server, as it is probably easier).

 

[DaveSimmons]

Any PC can be a server, you just need to run a server OS on it. You don't even need to do that if you just want to share files on a LAN (even Windows 95 can do that).

For info on server OSs (including free ones like linux and BSD) you might do some reading in the OS forum or some Googling since it's not really a hardware question.

Many servers are built differently than the average desktop PC, but how any particular server is built really depends on what extra things you need, for example:
* a rackmount case, or a big case for stacks of drives and/or a backup power supply
* a motherboard with dual processors, and/or onboard SCSI, and/or 64-bit PCI slots
* a big stack of disks and a RAID controller card
* tape backup

But none of that is needed to make a box a server.

 

[chocoruacal]

You need to tell us what it is you hope to serve...music, web site, files, etc. All you really need to do is connect a couple of comps and setup file sharing. If you want to do music/videos, there are all sorts of neat programs you can use, videolan, shoutcast, the list goes on. Again, let us know what you want to do.