[Herefordshire] Newbie Question: File Server

[chris procter]

> Or possibly something a little more exotic like a
> mac mini or a
> mini-itx system but it would probably be best to
> steer clear of
> something like that if it's likely to get
> complicated.
> 
> I'm not really sure what a file server is supposed
> to do either,
> except keep a backup, which we could maybe do with a
> usb hard disk
> anyway.
> 
> Thanks, Ben

Fileservers basically provide a single point for
storing all the files that are used by more then one
person so that they are alway accessable (a file
server is normally left on all the time whereas
desktops are turned off when people go home, and when
a machine is switched off obviously files on it are
inaccessable to other people), and all the data can be
backed up in one go rather then relying on each user
to backup their own stuff. This was big news in the
1980's now it sounds rather simple, but its still
really usefull.

On Linux you normally use either Samba (for windows
clients) and/or NFS (for unix clients) servers
configured to share certain directories and with
certain permissions so you can limit who can get to
and trash your financial records or whatever.

Technically file servers can be a basic desktop
windows machine with shared folders (with the blue arm
holding a folder icon), and can go up to
multi-processor machines with many terabytes of disk
space in multiple raid5 arrays depending on how many
users you want to support and how much data they
store.

For a handfull of users any machine with a disk large
enough for the data will almost certainly be fast
enough to do the job. A mac mini would be a reasonable
choice because they're near silent so can be left
running non-stop without being annoying they also can
run linux happily although wireless networking doesn't
work (this is true of linux on apple hardware generaly
the manufacturers don't release the specs for the
airport cards), alternativly OSX comes with all the
software you need for filesharing with wndows+linux
clients although that may be less interesting to set
up. However if you have an old PC lying around it
would be cheaper (and more environmentally friendly!)
to recycle that, plus you get to know a bit about
samba and nfs which looks ok on a cv if your into that
kind of thing.

Hmm, that was meant to be a lot shorter.

chris


	
	
		
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