How to build and Home network server

weegie.geek

I dunno, there were quite a few boards back then that had raid, the Abit KT7 boards had a few variations that did, and there were some others from Gigabyte and Asus iirc.

brig001

When you say all the PCs in the house, how many is that. XP pro only supports 10 incoming connections (usually 5 PCs, but can be less). If you hit that limit, it's back to Win 98, Windows server or Linux.

esuhl

be_alright wrote: »

If the motherboard has it already, why not use a RAID set up?

The RAID controllers built-in to motherboards are usually of a proprietry format... In other words if the motherboard goes kaput, the only way to recover data would be to find an identical board to connect to the drives. With an old motherboard that might be a bit of a problem.

It's ironic that using a motherboard RAID solution to backup data could *increase* the chance that you lose everything, but I'd just try to keep straightforward backup images that can can easily be read on other PCs.

weegie.geek

esuhl wrote: »

It's ironic that using a motherboard RAID solution to backup data could *increase* the chance that you lose everything, but I'd just try to keep straightforward backup images that can can easily be read on other PCs.

That's as true for a third-party card's raid as it is for raid built into a motherboard.

There's always windows' built-in software RAID. In XP it's limited to 0 and 1 but by hex editing a couple of DLLs you can restore the RAID5 function. Totally portable between motherboards and windows installs.

sysadmin

weegie.geek wrote: »

There's always windows' built-in software RAID. In XP it's limited to 0 and 1 but by hex editing a couple of DLLs you can restore the RAID5 function. Totally portable between motherboards and windows installs.

And as slow as hell

pepsi_max2k

A few things....

1. Wireless? It might be better to run a network cable to it just to avoid a) any wireless dropout, and b) lower wireless speed.

2. xp... fine, but many would stick on a copy of linux, set it up as a pure server (many will have some form of option for this during OS install eg. ubuntu) and share files using samba.

3. Using without a monitor: almost all servers will allow remote shell access via telnet or, preferably, ssh. With this it's very simple to log on to the machine via a command line and run simple commands on it, such as "restart" or "shutdown -h now" (guess what they do?). You can run the whole machine via a command line so you don't hae to worry about controlling it directly, although how far you'd get doing something similar with xp I'm not sure (maybe VNC in).

4. backups. as others have said, raid might be an idea, but i don't know if you're using the server for backups anyway (only storing on it copies of data from other PCs) so there may be no point running a mirroring raid array.

sysadmin

OR if your just looking for some file storage that you can share between computers over a network then why not look at a NAS device?

I brought a Terastation which has a 1TB (terabyte = 1024 gigabytes) of storage and is capable of RAID 0,1 and 5. It also has 2 USB ports so that you can back it up. Its got 10/100/1000 LAN card in it so it would connect to a network easily.

I think i paid £150 about a year ago, so they have probably come down since.

Idiophreak

sysadmin wrote: »

OR if your just looking for some file storage that you can share between computers over a network then why not look at a NAS device?

I was gonna suggest this too...If you're gonna need to buy a disk to back this lot up onto, anyway, may as well splash out a couple of extra quid and get a NAS disk - uses less energy, quieter, etc. Can then just use the PC to do the backups.

Food for thought

S0litaire

One thing to look into with the windows PC is to set up "NetMeeting" or "Remote Desktop Connection" on it!

That way you can access the server from anywhere in the house (if it's not crashed, hung and is still running)

Ideally I'd use Linux it's easier to set up, and turn on and leave.

weegie.geek

sysadmin wrote: »

And as slow as hell

Slower than a hardware-based solution, yes, but unless you're sharing things over a gigabit network you're not going to notice the difference. Saying it's slow as hell is a bit of an exaggeration.

Free RAID5... Considering that for the price of a decent hardware-based raid card you can add another 750GB to your machine, lots of people would choose "slow", especially if the network is the bottleneck.