home file server wireless question

[bumbles]

Dear All,

Apologies if this question has been dealt with many times before - if so please feel free to direct me to the relevant threads.

At present at home I have a desktop PC currently dual booting XP and Puppy Linux and my wife has a laptop running Windows Vista - we share a wireless broadband connection.

I am looking to upgrade my desktop and would like to recycle my old machine (Athlon 2400+ 1GB RAM) with the addition of some more harddrives to become a file server for our expanding music and photo collection.

How do I configure this machine as a fileserver which would be accessible by both the desktop and the laptop wirelessly.

Is it simply a case of connecting directly to the Router with an ethernet cable? Or is it possible to be completely wireless?

Can anybody point me in the right direction re best distro/server software (is this a Samba situation?)

As I say - we already share the internet connection - the server would be used simply to serve all our files and also act as a backup device.

Any help would be much appreciated.

I am comfortable in using both windows and linux but have never really ventured into networking (other than sharing the connection).

Many thanks in advance...

[Dapper Dan]

Hi bumbles and welcome to the forum.

I'd run the machine connected but wireless should be okay if you have good signal strength. I'd set it up as an FTP/SSH server with a static IP which would be accessible from all operating systems. I'd think there are installable FTP server choices from Puppy like proftp, ftpd, pro-ftpd and others but I haven't fooled with Puppy enough to know... sorry. If there are, Puppy should be just fine as a file server.

Once the Puppy FTP server is set up and going, you can access this machine from its static IP address with any ftp client. Filezilla or Krusader are good Linux choices. In Windows, try WinSCP. There is a Filezilla client for Windows too.

[Mudgen]

You can do what Dapper Dan says AND do samba for better integration with XP and Vista. You could then have the shares as mapped drives (Z:, etc).

[bumbles]

Thank you very much guys!

It all sounds fairly straightforward - I will let you know if I run into any problems!

[Footer]

For a little more flexibility, you could try FreeNAS. The learning curve isn't too steep and it supports tons of protocols (I have Linux, Mac, and Windows machines talking to mine). Google for links and support ...

[urwatuis]

I have a FreeNAS server and I like it alot. I think its the way to go. its a free download, installs easy and as Footer said the learning curve is not too steep....even I could figure it out and I am a newb

[Mudgen]

I wasn't familiar with FreeNAS, but just browsed some of the doc at freenas.org. It looks very good, although built on FreeBSD Unix instead of Linux.

Do either of the two FreeNAS posters have any experience with version upgrades? That would be my main concern. When I last worked with FreeBSD, it did all upgrades from source, but this is an appliance kind of thing, so I was wondering.

[Kloschüssel]

I can recommmend webdav for filesharing. It is fast, reliable and rather easy to set up across the different OS's. Basically it is just a extension to the HTTP protocol. Pick the server OS on your wish, it won't matter that much. I personally like ubuntu, debian or other debian derivates.

[Footer]

I wasn't familiar with FreeNAS, but just browsed some of the doc at freenas.org. It looks very good, although built on FreeBSD Unix instead of Linux.

Do either of the two FreeNAS posters have any experience with version upgrades? That would be my main concern. When I last worked with FreeBSD, it did all upgrades from source, but this is an appliance kind of thing, so I was wondering.

I'm running ver. 0.686 and to be honest, I have not upgraded it since I installed it (almost 3 years ago now). It's almost a build it and forget it type of system. That said though, I think it's fairly easy to upgrade without losing anything. Very stable, well supported, nice platform and UI. By the way, I'm just a (happy) user!