General Suggestions for a novice

I have a 3 computer home network connected with a 4 port router with a
single VoIP phone line in the 4th port. Currently two PC's are on Win XP
and one is on Win 98.

Next week I will be receiving the parts to build a 4th pc which will replace
the oldest of the three, all of which are used on a daily basis. The
retiring PC is a Dell GX100 w/Celeron 466, 192 meg of ram and two small
drives.

I am planning to try and turn the Dell into a server for easier file
sharing, easier printer sharing, and to enjoy all the benefits of having a
server, although I am not sure what they all are. Tech Guy at my office
said this is common for retiring PC's. He suggested using Linux on the
server because it is not nearly the resource hog Windows is, and as a file
server, it will not be working very hard so it's limited processor capacity
wouldn't be too much of an issue.

I am wondering, can I have a Linux based server with three PC's running
windows XP? And if so, is it tremendously difficult? I know nothing about
Linux, but have no aversions to learning new things. One interest of
setting up a server is for the experience of doing so.

Thanks in advance for your input.

Kevin

<posted & mailed>

Kevin Moore wrote:

> The
> retiring PC is a Dell GX100 w/Celeron 466, 192 meg of ram and two
> small drives.
>

That is a good system for this purpose. And, for only servicing a few
home computers, then amount of RAM is fine for the file server. (RAM
becomes more of an issue when you have more clients accessing files
from the server--I noticed little improvement resulting from going from
128M to 384M on my fileserver at home.) How small are the drives? If
they end up being too small, or too slow, you can easily add a newer
hard drive at a later time.


> I am planning to try and turn the Dell into a server for easier file
> sharing, easier printer sharing, and to enjoy all the benefits of
> having a
> server, although I am not sure what they all are.
>

There are many things you can put onto a server. Some common uses are
file sharing, printer sharing, and a mail server / spam filter. With
the file server, you don't have to worry as much about where you place
files--they can be accesable from all computers. with the print
server, you don't have to worry about waiting for the computer with the
shared printer to boot (if you already share a printer with Windows--if
not, then the advantage is that all computer can use one printer).
With a mail server / spam filter, you can set automated backups of
mail, have mail download in the background every few minutes, use
SpamAssassin to filter out spam, and make your email accesible from any
of the networked computers. Mail server sound scary, but it really
means being able to read email from any of your computers. But, I
would wait until the file and printer sharing is setup before going too
far ;]

> I am wondering, can I have a Linux based server with three PC's
> running
> windows XP? And if so, is it tremendously difficult? I know nothing
> about
> Linux, but have no aversions to learning new things. One interest of
> setting up a server is for the experience of doing so.
>
> Thanks in advance for your input.
>
> Kevin

Yes, the file server can be accesible from the Windows machines.
Windows 98 and Windows XP play well with my file server.

file sharing/server = Samba
printer sharing = Samba

and, later
mail server = IMAP (Cyrus or Courier, depending on Linux distribution)

Since you will be new to Linux, find a new-user-friendly distribution.
That will save a lot of trips to google (and several hours of getting
configurations correct), but you will sacrifice some disk space.

< http://www.suse.com >
< http://www.mandrakelinux.com/ >
< http://www.redhat.com/ >

If you have the bandwidth, download Knoppix Live CD and see how Linux
will perform on your hardware.
< http://www.knoppix.org/ >
(This is a bootable CD that does not touch your hard drive, but boots to
graphical desktop.)