I had a job come in last week for a linux file server to connect a few windows machines together, and a few printers. The client was exposed to a linux file server in a previous job, and wanted something similar.
It was a small business, with not much money to spend, and the server was to be located in the office, no server room. This is the type of job I love doing.
I sourced an ex corporate desktop for about $150 including shipping, I think they can be had for a little less, but this was convenient. It was a P4 with SATA, which is what I was looking for. The ugliest case you could image, but had space for two hard drives. DVD writeable drive, 1 gig memory, built in gigabyte ethernet. It was perfect.
I bought two new 500 gig green SATA drives for RAID 1 configuration, $70 each, and an external 500 gig drive for backup, which ran $100. So about $400 in hardware, but a really nice set up, should be very reliable, and the data should be very safe.
I was a bit of a cowboy when it came to the operating system, with karmic about to be released, I chose it over jaunty or LTS because it had a newer Samba. Turns out the Samba version wasn’t very important as most of the PC’s were running XP home edition, which doesn’t even do domain logins.
I tired to convince the client to get two external drives to keep one off site in case of a fire or something. But instead we are using the DVD drive to write backups for off site storage.
It was a really nice job, gave me a lot of energy and the client is happy. Can’t ask for more than that.
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