Setting up a home fileserver

[Cyberus]

We have a wireless network in our house, there are three of us living there.
We've got the network set up nicely, and one of the things that we often access from each other's shared drives is music. I was in my local computer shop the other day, that deals with secondhand computer bits, and saw a PII rackmount server - he wanted 40 quid for it, and I was tempted to get it, so we can have a machine that is always on to store music/video that we can all access - thus freeing up space on our local hard drives, and somewhere where we can store files that we're all likely to use - such as zipped installs of common windows applications, and also somewhere we can all back up data from our hard drives. But what I was wondering, is what sort of system would I need as a minimum to do this?
Two systems I have lying around that I could use to do this are an A1200 with Blizzard 1260 and SCSI kit, or a PPC Mac (604). Or should I plump for a PC?

[MrZammler]

I'd use the Mac, mainly because a 1200 would be wasted for such task and the Mac might have higher disk access speed than the miggy. Make some tests on both though, see if you can all three stream at the same time from the Amiga. If the PPC Mac has IDE, that's a plus since you can have rediculus amounts of storage for nothing (as opposed on using SCSI disks). Then of course SCSI is known to be more reliable for such tasks.

Slap a UNIX system in there, set up NFS and off you go. (Or samba if you have windows machines in your network).

[Cyberus]

MrZammler wrote:
I'd use the Mac, mainly because a 1200 would be wasted for such task and the Mac might have higher disk access speed than the miggy. Make some tests on both though, see if you can all three stream at the same time from the Amiga. If the PPC Mac has IDE, that's a plus since you can have rediculus amounts of storage for nothing (as opposed on using SCSI disks). Then of course SCSI is known to be more reliable for such tasks.

Slap a UNIX system in there, set up NFS and off you go. (Or samba if you have windows machines in your network).

Thanks for the reply. The Mac (actually a Powerwave Mac clone) has onboard SCSI.
I have thought about the high cost of buying a SCSI drive(s) but then I could ask both my housemates to contribute...

[billchase]

Macworld has recently done an article on using older powermacs
for such tasks.  I haven't really read it, but might be worth checking
out on their website.

Link to articles

Hopefully that will point you in the right direction.

C Snyder

[Ilwrath]

A PII should be fine for a small fileserver.  Add as much RAM as you can to it, and do a few tweeks to use it, and you'll be good to go.

But, heck... I ran a P1/133 as a fileserver for about 3 years.  It would bog a bit on the integrated virus scanning I installed, but other than that, it never really complained.  

I currently have an old recycled Slot A Athlon 650 running as my file server, NAT router, firewall/packet filter, FTP server, HTTP server, SSH server, virus scanner, and still have enough processor left over to run a game server or UAE with a CNet BBS on it when I feel like it!  (Note, I don't really recommend loading that much crap onto one box, but even as such, it gets surprisingly good uptime.  Currently on about 2 weeks.  Not bad for a junk box with generic cheapo everything.)

I had originally thought about using an old Mac I had sitting around, as well.  But also, it was SCSI and I didn't want to spend that much on disks.  Plus I wanted the ability to add a 2nd NIC for NAT, Firewall, and packet filtering.  While the Mac did have PCI slots, they weren't very compatible and I didn't have drivers for a 2nd NIC.  :/  Hence, I shelved it.  I think it's now in the back of my attic, somewhere.

Anyhow, I agree that I wouldn't use the Amiga for this.  An 060 Amiga is valuable, rather slow (but fun) and somewhat rare; while an old PC is cheap, fast (but boring), and easy to replace parts on.