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Quoting Richard Brown <rich@xxxxxxxxxxx>: > Hi All > > On Thursday 01 June 2006 17:27, Simon Waters wrote: >> so the absolute minimum spec will >> depend entirely on what it has to do. >> >> How many client machines, sharing what sort of files, and what sort of >> access pattern? What is acceptable performance? > Thanks for the replies. The network consists of one Fedora core 5 (pentium 4 > 512 ram 8 gig hd) box, one Mac Powerbook Laptop (G4 1.5 gig ram), one Magnia > web server (headless and no keyboard/mouse) and one Windows 2 k (p3 450mhz, > 6.4 hd, 64 meg ram). > > I tend to only use the windows box to check sites out and so it doesn't use > the files so much but I do have one or two folks who work for me who only > touch windows! The bulk of the work is done on the Fedora with some work done > on the Powerbook. > > I want to be able to share files and use a mirror raid and then > overnight send > to a backup drive! I will be using the file server to work from. i.e. I don't > intend to place the files on the hard drives of the Fedora box or Powerbook. > I was hoping to maybe try to install Fedora on the current Windows box, and > then up the ram on the current Fedora box and run that as the file server, > but I have to admit I don't know whether the file server needs the power or > whether the workstations need the power! > > I don't have a lot of money at the moment so whilst I would love to go down > the road of a San, I am not sure I can afford to! > > Thanks for the help. > -- > Rich > http://www.cregy.co.uk > Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. > Romans 12 v 1 From experience, with Samba if you have more memory the performance improves. I'm sure if you add another 64 or 128MB to the P3 machine and install some distro (I would recommend SME Server @ www.contribs.org) if you want to get it up and running quickly. The SME Server box would automatically configure the drives as raid during installation and if a drive went down then it is quick and easy to rebuild the mirror (1 hour for a 200GB mirror on a Sempron 2600 IIRC). If you don't need to use the Windows machine for anything other than file serving then you wouldn't really need X Windows which would take up extra valuable memory. My file server is running Debian 3.1, but I'd also suggest Ubuntu. What sort of backup strategy are you looking at? Just a thought, a USB2 hard drive may be ideal. Just plug it in and have a CRON job backup your server every night. The other cheap alternative I'd suggest is a DVD-writer with DVD-RAM support. DVD-RAM discs are generally more reliable than DVD-R discs and can be re-written upto about 1,000,000 times which should give you a few backups before they start to fail :-) Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html