Home Network Setup

[Ryu Hayabusa]

Okay. So I got an old Dell PowerEdge 4400 w/ 8 18.8GB SCSI Drives from work (retired and they gave it to me) so I'm trying to set up it up as mainly a media server/backup network drive. I am a system builder for residental users (side business) and a system admin at work. I don't really deal w/ the actually set up of the servers and networks. I have a Linksys WRT110 wireless router w/ 4 10/100 ports . I have installed Ubuntu on the server and i have it up and running, but now I'm in completely unfamiliar territory. I've only really worked w/ Windows so a Linux based OS is completely alien to me. I want to be able to map to the server as a Network drive to store music, videos, pictures, documents, etc. I haven't really played around on the Router yet because i will have to reset the router in order to get into the admin utilies. (lost all my documentation in a fire as well as my digital backups on my computer.)

 

I plan on upgrading my office equipment sometime after the Holidays w/ a true N Router and a 8 port switch, as well as a new computer just need to raise 1500 dollars for everything I want to do. Eventually i want to turn my old computer into my media server and use this one as a learning device for Linux and other things.

 

What I'm needing is advice on how is the best (in your opinion) way to set up this network to get what I want out of it and for the future upgrades planned.

 

Any advice or a direction to be pointed to do some research is greatly appreciated.

Edited November 24, 2009 by Ryu Hayabusa

[shibby_geek_guy_69]

As far as the fileserver setup goes, have you installed ubuntu Server or Desktop edition?

Since you're coming from a windows platform, I would be tempted to send you on the Desktop edition route, purely for ease of configuration reasons (For a windows person )

I'd suggest either:

a) Configuring one of the SCSI drives to be an ordinary disk, and the rest to be RAID 5, or

b) Throwing in another ordinary drive on top of the SCSI drives already there...

 

So that you have your operating system on a completely separate physical volume, for performance reasons.

 

Not sure where, but there is a configuration utility (GUI) somewhere in ubuntu to configure Samba, and last I checked, it was pretty intuitive and self explanatory...

Configure your shares for anonymous or guest access and your set

[Ryu Hayabusa]

Originally I loaded the Desktop version to test the Drives and make sure everything was up an running. But i'm having issue trying to load the server software. It keeps erroring out when I'm partitioning the drives. I know all the drives are good but it pops an error stating something about Creatating /ext4 file. Again, Ubuntu and servers are new terriorty so i'm kind of stumbling through this.

[willamtarker]

hi all.

I am to set-up cyber cafe for my uncle.