Home server

[Schecters]

Hello all,

I am going to be building a home server (excited ). I can get M$ Server 2003 from my school through MSDN for free, so I am going to be using that for the actual server. But I am wanting to use linux for file/storage. How would I go about doing that? I have used linux and like it, but I have never tried to make windows and linux play together, so I'm a little lost at where I should go from there.

Any suggestions/comments/whatever would be appreciated.


P.S.

The reason I will be using Server 03 and not linux for the actual administration is 1) I have the enterprise edition and paid $0 for it, and 2) I am taking a server class and want to become well acquainted with it (for future job familiarity)

[Saxon]

Have a VM of FreeBSD7 set up as a http server an book mark the ip so you can upload an download files from it, or do it the real way an have a dedicated unix box as Microsfat has no place in the server world.

[Jayce]

I set up Samba on my Ubuntu machine. At first it seems really complicated, but it's actually easy.

At my house, we have about 6 computers, and nobody in my family likes backing up their files cause, you know, hard drives last forever. :P So I set up my personal desktop with an extra 250gb hard drive and I use my Samba server on that.

I basically created folders for each user on that hard drive. Then, I installed Samba. There's a config file for Samba, and I altered it so each account was password protected. So that way my brother can upload his pictures of him doing stupid **** and my mom, who also backs up to my Samba setup, cannot get into his share and see his stuff.

In order for them to back up to my server, they go to start - run - and type in \\192.168.1.103 (which is my IP address to my computer). From there, they're prompted with a login box...which I let them choose passwords for. Once they log in, their share appears on their screen. From there, they just copy/paste over to it and it's written to my desktop.

I've never had a single problem with Samba, except for the learning curve of understanding how it works and setting everything up properly. I consider it very user friendly (once you figure out the config file to your specification).

Post back if you want more help on it... but hit up Google to find some documentation on it. I recommend it.