Greetings, long time trawler, first time poster etc etc

I am mildy experienced linux user having run Linux desktops on and off for a few years, and the odd FreeBSd router/gateway before that and running (k)ubuntu as my desktop for the last year or so.

I've always run a small home office network, but am now looking to expand some of the functionality of my machines, and the ability to work across any of them fairly seamlessly

For the record I have
1) My primary desktop AMD Athlon 2800+ 512MB ram Nforce2 chipset GeForce 5200FX 200gb hdd running (k)ubuntu 6.10 and WinXP SP2
2) Secomdary desktop AMD Duron 1gig, 512MB ram, Nforce2 'shuttle' chipset, currently with an 8.4G hdd, in need of a OS install (most likely ubuntu 6.10)
3) my (modded) xbox which basically acts as a media centre
4) My 'fileserver' which I am in the process of wrestling with HP Vectra VE, PIII 500Mhz, 192MB ram, 200GB hdd (primary) and 100GB hdd (secondary currently holding all my media files in NTFS partition, the intention being to reorginise and transfer these onto the 200GB drive and serve them to the network from there)
6) My lappy, Acer Travelmate 514TXV running ubuntu 6.06LTS (cos I havent needed to use it for a while)
5) Netgear router (which also acts as dhcp server)

SO, down to the nuts and bolts, is Ubuntu server a good platform to build a fileserver that talks NFS and Samba, and can act as a IS server so I dotn have to arse about adding users on each machine as required, Im familiar with command line and ssh, but would prefer web administration of the machine if I could... also what is a logical way to partition the 200gb hdd on the fileserver?

Sorry long post I know, and lots of waffle. But thanks for any advice in advance

Cheers

Justin (aka darclaird)

I've had really good luck with using ubuntu edgy server on my machine. I have a single server that runs MythTV backend+frontend as well as serving out all my media files with samba. For the MythTV frontend I had to install the xserver also. It's all running on pretty meager hardware (celeron 2.2, 512 ram, 2x250gb HDs) the main brunt of my mythtv stuff is handled by my hauppauge pvr-350 mpeg2 chip and the nvidia fx5500, so the celeron barely gets touched. If you're interested in just serving files, ubuntu-server is excellent. I would install Webmin http://www.webmin.com/
It is an excellent web-based system admin tool which can configure just about all that is required. There's a .deb package suitable for most all debian-based systems. It even properly detects your system during install and configures itself correctly.

Good Luck

Thanks, I'll look into it