A couple of friends and I have plans to purchase/obtain a server cheaply, and then use it as a file server for all of us. At the moment, each one of us connects through an 10/100 ethernet connection in our rooms, which is connected to the local College internal network. So the question is, how do we do it? Questions that need answers [*]Server must pass traffic internally and avoid connecting to the internet if possible. [*]how can I control it? VNC? Does this still work if the server is in another room? I have a copy of XP Pro, but is it better to run Fedora/Ubuntu/any other distro of Linux? It must still be easy to access for computer newbies. It also must have some kind of music streaming function, as we can stream music for party's and whatnot. Maybe install iTunes and make the library shared - how viable is that? personally, I don't like it (can't be done with Linux for obvious reasons), is there another way? [*]Since it's going to be in someone's room, that person will need to share the connection with the server. I know of several ways to do this, so which way is the cheapest and most efficient (switch/hub, or internet sharing, or what?) [*]Say I had the extreme case of 20 computers streaming music off it at the same time, what sort of minimum specs would I be looking for? Any help is appreciated
Do you reckon an Athlon XP1700+/P4 1.7GHz with 512MB RAM will be able to handle 4 or 5 people streaming music at once? Can I get away with an PIII?
Did you see the thread earlier about the Dell servers for £100??? As far as I know... use a hub if its not for connecting to internet vnc works just fine depends, feel safer with linux and can be less of a hog, but XP will be fine (using XP at mo) iTunes would work, you could play any song from server (I think) straight to any music player I'd go hub, as said above No idea about the specs, never tried 20. You need the help of a bit-tech pro I think Not much help mate, and I'm sure you'll get better replies once the veterans wake up. Dan
streaming music is not exactly cpu-intensive. i would think that a p3 could support 20 people doing that. it doesn't really need power until you start using it as a game server. xp will work perfectly fine, but will of course have a lot more overhead than a stripped down linux system running samba. and samba doesn't take too much work to configure, and once you have it configured then it will be exactly the same to access as a windows share.
Thanks for the helps guys. I'll probably scrape together an old machine from spare components I have lying around, the low spec requirements is great news. Will try out the linux/samba option too to see if it's any good. Hmm, is there anything that runs on Linux that can stream music to client machines?
Define stream... You can just attach the samba share as a network station and run the media from there... (doesn't get any easier I guess) BUT, think about it, streaming media to 10 pc's requires a hefty load of bandwidth... Certainly movies...
I reckon from what you guys think, it's looking better if I just play the music straight from the server.
I have an XP box with a P4 2.4ghz playing file server for me (more because I'm not real comfortable with Linux). I manage it via VNC or remote desktop (depends more on my mood rather than anything else). I'm using Tversity for music streaming as it supports the common media streaming protocols, has a transcoder, and is free. But if you are going to serve a bunch of clients or do video, the CPU needs to be pretty fast. usually I just map a share a local drive and play media from that when using a PC.
I've got a ME box for my fileserver and I can stream both video and audio simultaniously. The machine itself is I think and XP-M2400 or somthing like that, with a 10 GB drive for the OS and a pair of 120 GB drives in a RAID1 array. The array is shared over the network and so I use the media players on the client machines (both Win and Linux) to actually play the media. For normal streaming, a 10/100 hub / switch is fine, but if you are downloading large files ( >10MB ) on your desktop and then transfering them to the server, you might want to get a Gigabit switch.
