Freebsd
 

hi there guys been looking at possible server software. i currently am looking at windows home server but im also looking for open source software such as freebsd and ubuntu server. i want this server as a backup server of my windows machine also looking into it being a file server and website hosting whats the best option ?

cheers mati

I would suggest debian stable as server. Easy to setup and low maintenance. My debian server acts as: file server( NFS and samba), rtorrent downloader, irssi irc chat bot, source game server( mainly Left4Dead2), open-ssh gateway to my home network computers that wake on LAN. For web-hosting apache can be install with minimal fuss.

For file server I heard FreeNAS is a good choice, FreeNAS is a FreeBSD base distribution developed to be a server. So it comes with all the stuff servers need.

http://www.freenas.org/

Good luck to you.

i have used this before as a simple file server but found it hard setting up passwords and users allowing access to certain folders

FreeNAS just got revised though, perhaps the version you used was more difficult to do this kind of things.
But also for what I understand any distro you use as desktop can be good for file sharing server, you just need to download the services you think you will want from the distro's repositories.
I will think that if you download CentOS and install it that will be a good replacement for your windows server.

Good luck to you!

Best is a combination of what you know and the hardware and the software.

Freebsd alone is fine for what you want. Freenas should work also. Almost any of the common distro's would work. I am fond of Opensuse but any of the top 20 at distrowatch.com ought to be fine.

thank you for all the replies i currently have set-up at work Linux ubuntu as a file server but I only have one share on it. I want to be able to have multiple shares on it and do be able to allow each standalone computer in the building to have access to the share they need for example

langridge share
Pam share
Michael share
Matthew share

i have these shares currently set-up and i can only map to the langridge share I want to be able to map Michaels computer to Michaels share on the server

what would be the best way forward changing the distro to a more suitable one or having a look through the Smb.conf file and seeing what I have done wrong

One good thing about ubuntu is that they have pretty good documentation.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Samba may be a good place to start.

I am not sure I understand this map issue.

If you are fairly new to Linux I would go for a small business solution called Zentyal. It's based off Ubuntu and has file-sharing web filtering etc, so its pretty much an all-in-one solution and can be used as a home server.

If you want to build your own server then FreeBSD or OpenBSD would be a good choice, as would most flavours of Linux. FreeBSD is good just for the Handbook documentation.

A good howto for building a FreeBSD server I found recently is here but the Samba part is still waiting to be done. Other useful resources, apart from here, are FreeBSD Forums and DaemonForums.