advice on building my own NAS file server

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dphu2

New Member
Hello all. This is my first post. I've searched through the forum and have read some good stuff. I had a few questions of my own that I hope haven't already been answered.

Currently I have a desktop that serves my music and video files to my xbox in the living room through SMB over ethernet. I'd like to build a cheap box that could serve as an NAS file server. I'm fairly computer savvy, but I've never worked with Linux before (but I'm not afraid to try). From what I've learned Linux would be a Samba type networking? I don't know what Samba is but I know the xbox is able to connect through Samba, so it should work. Reading different threads, a lot of people say that you can use old components to build a server because there's not much computing power needed. But I haven't been able to find out what the exact requirements would be. So here are my questions:

I need to build this CHEAP. But I want it to be powerful enough to do the job. I'd like to use SATA drives. Can anyone give me suggestions on the components?
Motherboard: (with 4 SATA ports). This will obviously need to match the processor. Please keep in mind that I'd like the ability to upgrade the processor some day in the future.
Proc: Powerful enough to serve files. Some day I will look to upgrade this, but for now, I need basically the cheapest components that will get the job done well.
RAM: Powerful enough to serve files but don't need to overkill, can always upgrade later, right?
Video Card: Do I even need a video card to run a file server?
Hard Drives: I'm ok on this, I will be installing 2 x 500gb SATA drives and will be adding more in the future.
Power: What size power supply would you recommend for an eventual 4 hard drive set up?
Case: I guess with an eventual 4 hard drive system, I will want ATX and not micro ATX, right?

Also, can anyone recommend a site that has a (step by step) tutorial for installing Linux as a file server and possibly an FTP server? Maybe even with screen shots for the uninitiated (me) :)

So that's all I can think of. Thanks in advance for taking the time to read my post.
 
easy. and yes, you dont need anything fancy, unlike vista, linux is simple. so the onlything i would invest in is a good large harddrive. and the nice thing is the samba server is nice and easy to set up. linux acually has a program that lets you set it up. unfortunatly i am in hawaii and did not bring my "linux" computer so i can not give you good instructions but i am sure it is easy. first off, we need to know what distro you are going to use. some of the popular are fedora core, and urbiro (need to look how to spell it) and a few other. i use fedora core.
 
Thanks for the reply. So reading your post makes me feel more excited about tackling Linux. I took a quick look at http://fedoraproject.org/. It looks interesting.

Do boot times differ for Linux boxes? Are they any quicker than XP?

Also, if anyone wants to give me some advice on actual system components they'd suggest, I'm an open book.

One last thought, I'd like to make this system "headless" - is that the right term? Basically, I would like to be able to manage it from my desktop (Windows XP) so I don't have to buy another monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc. Does fedora still make sense?

Oh, and will I need a video card? I'd like to avoid having to buy one if possible.

Thanks again.
 
well, you will need the video card to set it up. but yes after you can setup a vnc server to let you controle it from your computer. also yes boot times can be quick or long. with linux you can set what you want started at bootup. so if you have a samba server, ftp and a vnc you can remove some processes to have it boot up fast. if you want a good list of distros there is a kinda new forum about it, just serch for it
 
okay this is easier said than done. If you have no experience with Linux it is not as simple as windows because you will probably have to do a lot of configuring in the samba file.

Or an easier method, is to install a nice little web based utility called web min.

www.webmin.com

Download the RPM file (if you are going to use a Red Hat based distro like previously mentioned) and install it on your Linux rig.

Then go into webmin by simply launching your favorite web browser and in the address bar type in localhost:10000. This will require the root password since it needs root level access to set up everything.

Go into the severs config page, make sure samba is set up to run at boot time every time, then go into your samba config utility. Most likely you will be using SWAT. Now set up an authorized user and their privileges since SMB does require authentication. Then connect to the share on your windows box by simply typing \\ip.of.linux.box\nameofsharedfolder

Now to create the folder you wish to keep all your shared data in. You probably will want to do this first actually. For exmaple purposes I will name my folder shared. Open up the terminal (or console depending on what its called in your distro) and type the following code. Also for example's sake we will say the user we authorized for the SMB authentication will be called netshare.

Code: 
mkdir /shared

This will make the directory called "shared"

Code: 
chown -R netshare /share

This gives that user ownership to everything in that folder and all its sub folders so you should have full r-w-x permissions. If that is not the case we can fix that later on, because sometimes permissions don't work out perfect first try or can become corrupted.

Now you are ready to connect to \\ip.of.linux.box\shared and your user name would be netshare and your password would be whatever you put in as the password in webmin.

Remember Linux is a case sensitive file system, so everything will be case sensitive. for example, /shared and /Shared will be two different directories on your rig.
 
Thanks for the input tlarkin. I've been following this post since I started it. I'm still working on getting all the components together. It's a slow process when stuck on a budget. But in any case, I'm looking into all the advice given so far. Your instructions seem very concise. I'll admit that for someone who has never dove into the world of linux, the line code seems pretty daunting. But I'm sure it's just a matter of reading up on it.
 
dphu2 said:
Thanks for the input tlarkin. I've been following this post since I started it. I'm still working on getting all the components together. It's a slow process when stuck on a budget. But in any case, I'm looking into all the advice given so far. Your instructions seem very concise. I'll admit that for someone who has never dove into the world of linux, the line code seems pretty daunting. But I'm sure it's just a matter of reading up on it.
Click to expand...

BASH is overwhelming at first, just take a deep breathe and go with the flow. Keep your data on a separate partition in case you botch it, then you won't lose it.

Also, that is why I recommended webmin, because it has a web-based GUI to configure everything so you'll hardly ever have to do work from the command line.
 
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