I am in the early planning stages of setting up a network at home. The plan is to have a MythTV front end in the living room with the backend elsewhere in the house. The backend will be a file server, either in my study or in the loft. I also want to host my own website on the same server, if possible.

My fiance doesn't want any wires at all, so it will all have to be done wirelessly (I know that *might* not be the most efficient way of serving files to a website, or a MythTV front end, but unless I can get a phone line put into the loft, it's the only choice.

It's taken me a while to decide where to post this, it doesn't fit the rules on posting in "networking" and I do also want some advice on what hardware I should be thinking about... but I decided to post here.

I want to know what I would really be needing (hardware and software) for the server. I was assuming I'd need LAMP, as the server will be running a php blog, a web server and eventually a mail server (though I've not decided if I'm just going to run citadel and let it control the mail bits) I'll need Samba, as my Fiance won't make the linux leep until there is an EndNote for Linux - she refuses to learn bibtex. But what is the best way to mount my shares from the server on the local boxes around the house?

Also, any suggestions on a router/wireless PCI combo would be nice, so I know what I am looking at getting (my current wireless router has trouble getting a signal into the garden, so it won't manage to get a signal from the loft to the ground floor.

I think that is it... no doubt I will have forgotten something...

Thanks

To add shares, in Windows just map network drives and tell it to reconnect at login

To mount in Linux, put the drives in your fstab