2 replies to this topic

[demo100]

Hi I am a new Linux user, only about 3 days now, never used it before. Here is what I am trying to do and hopefully get a few questions answered. I have been readin alot about Linux, and well, I would learn one thing and it would open up 2 new questions. So by the end of the day I was left with a head ache, and a computer on teh verge of being smashed...lol

What I aspire to do.

I want to run a home server, the purpose of this server would be to save all our family pictures, videos. Have a common directory where I can save all of our movies, music, and miscellaneous other types of files. I want this so that it can be accessed anywhere on our home network.

Right now I have it setup with external Hard drives attached via USB to some of the PCs on the network, using shared folders. Although this method is working there are some complications that I find with this that I would like to solve with a server.

1.) The files tend to be all over the place, I have 2 1tb drives, with 2 250gb drives. I have everyone saving files all over the place and well things are messy, and get lost in the family wasteland of files.
2.) I find that when watching movies over the network they tend to be slow. I find that movies tend to be choppy and that the buffer is never able to keep up with the movie itself. So half way thrue the movie we get a 5 minute family break, and a 15 minute rewind in the movie.
3.) Backup is a nightmare, I find myself backing up duplicates, and well a waste a lot of disk space on things that are already backup 3 or 4 times.

What I have planned

I want to be able to place all of those different external hard drives to rest and place all disk space on the server. Once this is done it will make it much easier to map the family files to a single drive rather then have 6 or 7 that we have now. This will make it easier to backup and maintain (well from what understand thus far about computers)

What Hard I have at the moment.

Before I will commit too much income to this project I want to trying on a smaller scale and learn how it works. I made a small Frankenstein computer from my older computers.

3tb hard drive (2x1.5tb)
Asus board (p5p800-vm)
4gb RAM (DDR RAM 533)

Now for the actual questions.

Which Linux should I go with if I want to run a small home server? I checked this on the internet, for a clear answer and I cannot find any real answer. I can find different modules that some of the linux have, but nothing that really helps me or answer my question clearly for what I need.

does Linux have a ram limit like windows? I know that windows 32 it version only have 4gb ram limit. Is this the case also for Linux?



Any advice that anyone could have please, let me know. If I am way off with what I want to do please let me know, I am relatively new to networking and have little experience with servers in general.

Thanks

[rvalkass]

Linux is customisable to the extreme, so any Linux distribution would work fine. They all have a much smaller memory and processor footprint than Windows, and you can turn off any extra features in your distribution that you don't need on a file server. This guide looks quite good, and explains how to configure Kubuntu (albeit an older version) for the best performance as a file server. I would certainly agree with the choice of Kubuntu (or another distribution with a GUI) to start with as it makes configuring and learning much easier, which is helpful if you're new to Linux. A file server won't exactly need a huge amount of processing power either, so the small performance hit from running a GUI compared to a purely command-line based distribution is a good price to pay for the ease of use.

As for sharing files with other PCs (if they're running Windows) you'll need to install a package called "samba". Their website has excellent resources explaining exactly how to use every feature samba provides, including full example situations. It's also an incredibly popular piece of software, so help and guides are very easy to come by elsewhere.

The RAM limit in computers is hardware dependent, not software dependent. With a 32-bit processor, the largest integer it can count to is 2³²-1 which is 4294967295, or exactly 4GB. With a 64-bit processor that increases to 1717986918GB, which should be plenty. This requires the processor to be a 64-bit processor and the operating system to be 64-bit. If you use a 64-bit processor then make sure you install the 64-bit version of the OS to take full advantage of it.

[demo100]

Thanks that link actually help alot

Now to start building the server and learning teh ins and out