I am setting up a file server for my family, a single location for backups, storage, etc.

I had a AM2 x2 3800, MSi board, 1gb dual channeled ram, power supply, and case lying around.

So i bought a new video card, 2 hard drives (320GB) to RAID 1 and DVD burner


So now, i need a distro to set up a file server to share over the home network.

I did like Open Suse when i was testing it out. I liked it for its design and simpleness. If there is anything better, please, do speak up.


I'm a Linux noob at best, but i do know the basics of it..

P.S.- How do you set RAID 1 in Linux? Is that motherboard driven, or the Linux os?

Can't go wrong with FreeNAS I have it setup at work on an old SGI server I had acquired. No problems whatsoever.

I forgot about that one..... Thanks

With that, can you schedule when it shuts down, and when it starts up? wake on lan? If it can do that, that would be perfect..

+1...FreeNAS is so lightweight (it's less than 40 mb), yet so easy to use and full of features.

It has support for software raid, a web interface, and a ton of other features and protocol support.
I definitely recommend this distro.

It apparently does have support for remote shutdown through the web server.
It can also probably be scheduled with 'cron' if you really need to schedule it. (look into `crontab -e` command with the `shutdown -h now` command).
It also has support for WOL features, although that's more of a hardware issue then software.

There is also OpenFiler, NASLite and an Windows based one Windows Home Server (present issue with data corruption)

alright, I'll try that out on my vmware virtual machine.. see what i can see. I have to wait for my motherboard to come back from RMA though. It's on its way back, just be another day or 2

Something tells me that little detail will be a "deal breaker" for a backup system.

As long as you have just 1 hard drive in the server, then you will be fine. I purchased the 500 gig server from HP and love it, once the bug is fixed this summer I'll add more drives.

The software has been out since July 16 of last year and it still hasn't been fixed? Wow, talk about poor decision making on Microsoft's part. They've at least known about it since 12/20 when they warned users of the seriousness of the flaw and still nothing has been done about it.

There's also Ubuntu Server. Very lightweight and with webmin very powerful.

Paying money for an OS when the alternative is as good (for me, it's much better) and free is simply beyond me. Some just need to start functioning outside Microsoft world.

That should be hardware driven. In the BIOS there should be a place to turn on RAID for specific drives, then when you reboot there should be a key like F0 to get into a RAID Manager so you can set what RAID you want (be careful though, this will wipe the data on those drives so do this first before installing the OS).

+1

I just installed it on my server yesterday, and it works very good. Switched from a corrupt Debian system... first time using Ubuntu in years.

Yeah, i'll try all, see what i like. but my motherboard is acting up again...