Linux Box as External Hardrive

[adempewolff]

Hello, I need to be able to store a large amount of files off of my computer and can't really afford an external hardrive at this point in time and don't really trust usb drives anyway. What I would like to do is set up an old computer with a large hardrive, fast ethernet card, and a barebones distro of linux with filesharing enabled (probably microsoft file sharing because it would need to share files with windows xp home and ubuntu both of which can do microsoft file sharing.

I pretty much know what to do hardware-wise but don't know enough about linux to know what distribution would be best and how I could set it to only boot up the neccesary drivers and processes for file sharing so it used the least resources possible.

If anyone has any suggestions or knows of any good howtos it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[framp]

...and can't really afford an external hardrive at this point in time and don't really trust usb drives anyway

I see 4 alternatives:

1) Use an external USB drive which is quite easy - but you don't trust usb drives
2) By a NAS box which already has all the CIFS/SMB and NFS capabilities you need - is also quite easy
3) Use one of the NAS Linux distributions available for free, e.g. freeNAS which is easy to setup
4) Setup a regular Linux box as a samba/nfs server.

I have a SuSE 10.2 box running as a disk and printer server in my home LAN.

[adempewolff]

Thanks, I ended up buying an external harddrive enclosure and putting a spare hdd in it. I am beggining to like usb, I think I just had too many bad experiences with 1.0 I didn't give 2.0 a chance.

Thanks for pointing me towards those NAS links, that was exactly what I was looking for and even though my imeadiate problem is fixed I think I will use that in the future.

[framp]

.. that was exactly what I was looking for and even though my imeadiate problem is fixed I think I will use that in the future.

If you want to get familiar with Linux find a concrete computer problem you have and solve it with Linux . In your case it's the NAS story, in my case it was a router and firewall story. This takes some time but you have a huge community in this forum which will help you