setting up home server

[alecwlkns]

I have several computers at my home. One running Ubuntu 10.10, one running Ubuntu 11.04 studio, and three running Win7. what I would like to do is network them all together, connecting them to a central storage server. What type (ie- samba, ftp..) would be the best for me, and how would I go about setting one up?

[Irithori]

Probably one of the easiest ways is to use FreeNAS
I built myself one with
- atom n330 CPU
- 4GByte RAM
- mini ITX
- 4x 2TByte sata in a zfs raid-z1 setup, aka close to 6TByte useable data.
- gigabit ethernet
- Boot from usb stick


This setup reaches around 30MByte/s, which is ok-ish for my home use.
The bottleneck is clearly the CPU.
Depending on what you want to achieve in terms of performance/power consumption/temperature/noise,
a more powerful multicore cpu and more ram (ZFS prefetch caching is only turned on if zfs has a minimum of 4gbyte ram for its own) will help.

As for cifs/ftp/rsync/afp..
They are all available.
It depends on what you want to do.
Least common denominator is probably cifs,
but rsync or nfs will be faster/are less performance hungry for your linux hosts.

[jonantice]

If you want to set up file shares for both Linux and Windows computers you will want to use samba (cifs) because windows, gnome and kde have built in graphical methods for browsing available samba shares on the network. With ssh or ftp you would have to manually mount (map drive on Windows) each share on each computer.
In addition to the file shares on my server I also have two media servers:
mt-daapd (firefly) which serves up an iTunes shared library, and
Mediatomb which serves up a uPnP media server which is accessible network enabled devices.

If all you will be sharing is media (music, videos, pictures) then all I would just a media server and ssh for admin and file access (sftp).

[atreyu]

I like irithori's idea of FreeNAS (i've still yet to set one up).

You can't go wrong with an Ubuntu or Fedora based file/media server. They both have huge repositories of free software (which you'll want/need as you go about your task). Just about all of the core things you require (CIFS/Samba, NFS, FTP, maybe Apache/LAMP) will be right there in your default installation, most likely.

If you want to go all in, there are some great advancements in the realm of all-in-one media center solutions for Linux, too. Just google for them. Here's one list as an example.

[nixblog]

I have several computers at my home. One running Ubuntu 10.10, one running Ubuntu 11.04 studio, and three running Win7. what I would like to do is network them all together, connecting them to a central storage server. What type (ie- samba, ftp..) would be the best for me, and how would I go about setting one up?

As already mentioned, FreeNAS is a very good option and is based on the rock solid FreeBSD platform. There are a number of Linux based solutions out there such as ClearOS and the Ubuntu based Zentyal which is another good option too.