Ubuntu 10.04 & Samba Help
 

Hello All,

Heres what I have and what I am looking to do.

I have a PC with a single core 2 Ghz Pentium processor and 1 gb of RAM. Its pretty limited in what it can do and run. It has two physical HDDs one a 250 GB SATA and the other a 160GB SATA. One the two hard drives I have the following partition structure:

160 GB HDD
28 GB Ubuntu OS Partition
2 GB Swap Partition
130 GB Free Partition (EXT4 but empty)

250 GB HDD
250 GB Free Partition (EXT4 but empty)

What I would like to do is the following:

1. Strip down Ubuntu 10.04 to where only the bare minimums run and system resources (Since they are so scarce on this system anyway) be readily available

2. Have the system run solely as a Samba File server for all other computers in the house to read and write to

3. Allow other "known" systems to access the shared folder without authentication, but any system with an unknown name, should have to authenticate first

4. Have the 130 GB from HDA and 250 GB from HDB, be presented as one network drive of 380 GB as opposed to two of 130 and 250 gb respectively

Are these things that are possible for a person of mid level understanding of Linux? How would one set about achieving all of the above goals? Any help would be great appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Yes, they are.
One small step at a time. You have several different tasks that are all inter-related. Remember that Google is your friend, but it also takes a little bit of luck to get the right terminology.
Look into LVM which will allow you to present multiple physical disks as a single logical disk.
Multiple ways, Samba, CIFS, NFS to get started with. For authentication, if the native forms don't support it, consider LDAP and Kerberos, though these are likely more than you need.
Easily done with a simple samba setup. Start with reading some Samba literature and how to documents as well as some free books on-line
A 2GHz, 1GB ram system doesn't sound that resource scarce. If you want to stay with Ubuntu, there is the server remix which does not have X and a GUI making it much lighter on resources. Otherwise consider a different distribution. Gentoo comes to mind as one that is highly customizable and while it takes time to set up, tend to be higher performance because of the optimizations.

Thanks Noway2, for the detailed response. I think I have now enough information to get this done one weekend.

Much appreciated.

I'm trying to create a similar setup using slackware, interested to see how you get on. Keep us posted!