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- eaber81, on 10/12/2007, -1/+31If you would have bothered to read the article, you would have seen that he installs the LAMP server *AND* other programs to get the file server working the way he wanted it.
- Madh2orat, on 10/12/2007, -8/+26If schestowitz would have read the description, he would have seen it, some people are just comment happy.
HEY! A story on the homepage without a comment, I think i'll be the first, even though I have only seen the title, and not bothered to read the heading.
alright, enough of my rant, digg me down... - nofxjunkee, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17I use Gentoo on my servers and dugg you down... because the box used is a celeron 700MHz w/ 128M memory and a 10G disk. you _can_ build gentoo on that, and you can cross-compile on your Cray XD1 (kidding, obivously) and deploy to your little server, but why do that when you can use a distro with a binary pkg manager (and the software repo to go with it) by default? gentoo certainly kicks a lot of ass, but that doesn't make it the right distro or OS for everything.
- nizzy1115, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15Most computers have bios updates to fix this problem. I know the GX150 does, which runs a 933-1.2 ghz P3.
- alen3K, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12"Useful for downloading Linux ISOs or media from places like LegalTorrents.com.
" :)) - G-RaZoR, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11Well at the low cost, I am sure you can afford a bigger hard drive.
- stlpaul, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9You can usually get by with entirely disabling the drives in BIOS. As long as you have one BIOS-visible and bootable hard drive (or floppy) that can get the operating system started, you're usually good to go. I had a 266MHz Pentium-II with several hundred gigs worth of hard drives hooked up that way. I had a 16 gig boot drive which was about the biggest it could see. The rest were disabled but worked fine once the OS booted.
- rarkai, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I've been using a 100gb hdd with an athlon thunderbird for 5 years..... (p4 wasnt out when the t-bird was)
The bios and file system are the only thing that matters, not the processor - Wander2000, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Shipping kills the deal.
- schestowitz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5My bad, my bad. Thanks for correcting me, guys.
I guess my tone was misinterpreted. I only wanted to back the point further by showing how quickly LAMP servers can be set up. - allyant, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7A 10GB File server...
- TheBigGuycouk, on 10/12/2007, -5/+9http://www.freenas.org
5mins max - nessup, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6A "file server" and a regular "server" are two different things.
- cheeze_ballz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4i'm amazed that it took that long for someone to mention it -- freenas is great for for building a file server...that said, i don't believe that it has a mysql server (like the article suggests installing) -- but that's what your *other* LAMP box is for, right?
- p_o_b, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I have been looking for a way to do this for several days now. Thanks for the how to!
- dbr_onix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"Xbox Media Center for playing media files across the network" - "I also download large files, such as Linux ISOs, via BitTorrent".. There's something suspicious about those two sentences being in the same article..
Theres a few things in the article that make sense, like the fact Gentoo wouldn't be fitting, configuring stuff over web interfaces. Using a normal distro over something very spefic (like FreeNAS), since you can easily run things like TorrentFlux on it.
There are a few steps that make no sense, how ever - Like leaving the MySQL root account password-less
Passwd'ing the root account makes no sense, and is bad for security. Then, he continues to use sudo (never using the root password) - sudo was made to replace "su root"-ing. There is no need to change the root password (passwd -l root will remove the password-login)
Randomly using aptitude or apt-get (sudo aptitude update could quite easily be sudo apt-get update).
The launch pad is pretty excessive, you could just use a plain HTML page with realtive links..
To the people saying you could use FreeNAS - Sure, but it's very limiting, with a full distro, you can do much more - It's a little more work, but it's far more flexible, as shown, you can download files without having another computer running, you can run a web-server (obviously you wouldn't want to have it public accessable if it's configed as in this article, sicne it's pretty insecure, but for playing about with locally it's fine), play about with linux via SSH, or do.. well, lots of things..
The 10GB drive : You could quite easily add external USB drives. It's good to keep the data discs seperate from the OS drive, either via partitioning, or better - a seperate drive..
- Ben - hohlermann, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3The GX150 has an approximately 200 watt power supply and one active hard drive versus my workstation which has a 450 watt power supply, two active hard drives and a video card requiring external power. It's also quieter, smaller, fits in the media center, and I won't be heartbroken if it dies.
- DigitAl56K, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Actually the problem is quite complicated (But it is not related to the CPU type).
To begin with, there are limitations in various BIOSes that limit the amount of storage that can be addressed. Common ways to work around these issues for systems that encounter them are to flash the BIOS with a newer version or use an extender software which basically starts when the computer boots then catches and translates instructions that access large drives (these used to be common in the Windows 95-98 period but are rarely found nowadays).
Another issue is the particular file system you choose to use on your partition - older operating systems using the likes of FAT16 and FAT32 have certain limitations on the maximum logical volume size simply based on the addressing scheme of the file system. Modern file systems like NTFS can support very large drives.
There is a page here with a ton of information for those who are interested:
http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/hard_drive_size_barriers.htm
This is a lot better than reading the FUD here. - ga7sh, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2thanks phil.
YES i should've been more clear. what i meant was using a MOTHERBOARD that comes with an older system (say p3 or celeron), you can't support larger hard drives.
i thought it was implicitly understood, but whatever
as for the other suggestions, thanks. i'll look into it - madivad, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I followed the 15 minute install when I did my installation for a file/web server and although a very good and detailed procedure, I think this is just as good because it details the procedure followed by someone else to achieve a slightly different end. And 45 minutes is not bad by any standard when considering the headless install, extra xomponents and whatever else. Good work.
- cawpin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Too bad you're still wrong. I have a P3 500 that is my file server running FreeNAS. It has several large hard drives and has no problem whatsoever. The bios on it is from 2001 I think. It isn't the BIOS as long as you have 1 drive it will recognize. After that it is up to the file system.
- SteveHolt69, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1FreeNAS looks OK, but seems limited in what it can do.
I think the beauty of a cheap system like this is all the addons you can build into it later. I started with a similar system to this for filesharing and torrenting, which I now use for a webserver, firewall and router, network backups, and revision controlled subversion storage of all my documents. All of this is easy to install and supported by the OS and large user bases. - 15charmaxwtf, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Are there any good places to get cheap PCs in the UK?
- Twiggabe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Good article, but my choice of Linux for a File and Print server is SME Server. Way easy to set up and all the administration can be done through a web interface and/or Putty.
- h4lofourt33n, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1If you need a cheap PC for something like this, you should check out a site I posted awhile back called Retro Box. www.retrobox.com, huge selection and it seems like you'd get a better deal then this guy.
- LatvianHedgehog, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3#7 Don’t let your momma find your porn!
omigosh - BobMysterioso, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I read over this and it seems pretty interesting.
To ppl saying that it couldn't have a large HD in it - get an addon sata card.
But the real issue I have is his justifications. He wanted a headless box that would be "cheap" so he didn't have to leave his main pc on all the time. So, instead of leaving 1 pc on all the time, he'll have 2 on some of the time, but one on all the time. Couldn't he just turn his monitor off and realize some savings?
If he wanted seperate storage then a LAMP server or FreeNAS would work but from the opening justifications for the project, it doesn't make much sense. - lilrabbit129, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Anyone have a tutorial for setting up torrentflux on FC5/FC6? Been looking around and haven't found one yet.
- Phil246, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@DyDx, yes he does.
Older motherboards had issues with large drives - they couldnt allocate that much space into a single partition. Thats what he's getting at - not if the cpu could handle it.
Although, im sure p4 is pushing it just a little, there were motherboards capable of large drive capacities before then. - Badfysh, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Check out http://freecycle.org/ if you want a box for a LAMP server project. You often see old PC's being given away for free.
- rogersmj, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1My file server is a 500MHz P-III with an Asus mobo from the same era, and I have 6 drives totalling 1.6TB in it (400, 300, 300, 250, 250, 160). The best use of really old equipment is to make it a home file server, because you don't need much horsepower, and you don't have to worry about it not working with large hard drives as several of us have said. That's pretty lame to discount this article because of that. Do your research.
- lilrabbit129, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I think that problem is closer to P1-P2. I have 733mhz P3 that ran a 100GB HD. I do remember that it had issues using lilo, but grub worked fine.
File serving can easily be done on something like a 500mhz P3, at that point you run up against the bandwith issues of your network faster than your processor (on a 10/100Mbs network, Gigabit might be a different story).
Personally I'm running a small file/web server off a 1.3Ghz Tbird with 384MB of ram and its running like a champ. - robgue, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1hellanzb
this works great:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=169749&highlight=hellanzb - aximbigfan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1lol... i can get a dell gx240 for $50, with a 2.2ghz p4, preoaded with 128mb of ram and a highspeed cdrw drive... even better psecs for $30 less....
- DigitAl56K, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1lilrabbit129: It does not matter what processor you have.
"at that point you run up against the bandwith issues of your network faster than your processor"
Disk and controller I/O rates are far more likely to be a problem than network bandwidth vs throughput from the CPU, and even so, this should never cause a failure, only reduced performance. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0is there any program you could run your usenet downloads on remote on such a linux server? through .nzb uploading or something?
- pastrami, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0got a link to the gx240 for $50?
- kiwiruss, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0I use FreeNAS. its got most of this already and runs of a CF card
- pepote, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Headless? Freenas is accesible and fully operational via browser... you only need console (monitor and keyboard) during installation. Other thing is the BitTorrent client... but i'm sure it can be installed in a FreeBSD... K, i STFU :D
- madivad, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Headless does invoke some savings and I admit he seems to only want to include the server to save him having to leave his main PC on all the time. But by the same token, I too have several PC's running at home, with various tasks being conducted by each PC. It obviously chews MORE power, but that's not my main concern. My file server is restricted from the internet (both in and outbound), my download box is restricted from my file server, my main PC is for me to use and not any other apps that would be better served elsewhere. What I mean to say is, I find having other PC's doing the more mundane tasks, it free's my main PC for doing what I want to do and with little CPU usage getting in the way, ie, the CPU usage of torrent downloads (inc hard drive activity), file servers, web servers, mail servers (which works overtime due to spam attacks) and the like.
- pepote, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Agree with TheBigGuycouk. I've got a freenas server (250GB) and works really good (I did not make wi-fi work, but...). Uber-easy installation, almost zero command-line steps, and really neat options and capabilities. I would give it a chance, before any other "messy" NASses. No offense for the guy that did it, though.
- pauljaroszewski, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1using this tutorial, would i be able to access my server from anywhere in the world and download mp3 files/etc ? how does that work...do i just enter domain name/ visit my site and then put a login/pw into the interface? go easy, im a noob to this, thanks.
- nizzy1115, on 10/12/2007, -8/+7Sweet, i just have an extra computer laying around too.
- cawpin, on 10/12/2007, -10/+3wrong owner, bury
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -10/+2it would be good 5 years ago but at least it works as a dumb-counter and prove how many noob doesn't do it before, schoolgirls
- DyDx, on 10/12/2007, -14/+6Do you know what you're talking about? File-serving isn't a CPU intensive task by any stretch of the imagination. A 700 Celeron is just fine to serve files to a few users (2-5) in my estimation, especially if that's what the machine is soley for. The amount of space available has nothing to do with the CPU speed.
- darshanmistry, on 10/12/2007, -12/+3i like this idea so much that i am not going to follow it at all
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -12/+2BAH ubuntu!
- ga7sh, on 10/12/2007, -22/+7only problem is, using anything older than a p4, you cant really use a large HD. whats the point of a file server if i'm going to be limited to say, 80gigs.
kind of defeats the 'use your old pc to run a linux file server' point. not a linux problem, but a problem still - DarkSenay, on 10/12/2007, -23/+2screw Ubuntu servers, Gentoo FTW
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