File Server For Small Windows Network
 

A friend of mine works at a company that has a small lan of about 10 computers. One of the guys hard drive died and he lost all his data. He wants me to setup a file server for them so they can all store their important data up on the server.

Now obviously I'll be going with Samba on this since it's fairly simple. I'm leaning towards CentOS as the distro simply because it seems robust enough for this challenge.

So here is the first question: hardware. For a 10 person lan I'm sure a 200G hard drive will be plenty since they are storing only word/excel documents mostly. It is my understanding that Samba isn't very processor dependent so any half way decent processor should do. What I lack is a good backup strategy. On my personal server I simply do a hard drive to hard drive backup which has been fine especially since I've never had any type of failure. What type of backup strategy would you suggest in terms of both hardware and software? I think a RAID may be over doing it here but I could be wrong. Also, what type of anti virus would be good to use on this?

Secondly, it's been a while since I tweaked with Samba. Would the move be to simply cut and paste the clients My Documents up to the Samba shared drive and instruct them to save everything important to their My Documents? Also, wouldn't it be wise to have a seperate directory for each user on the Samba share?

Lastly, I'm wondering if anybody knows what to charge for this. Of course, the hardware will be at cost but I'm not sure what people charge for this type of labor.

Any suggestions/comments would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Gentoo would actually be quite okay for what you're after since you seem to have ran that - there's some excellent resources on the Genoo site about configuring samba and integrating ClamAV for automatic virus scanning of documents. That said, CentOS would also be a good choice too :)

With regards to mapping drives, since they're all Windows machines it would probably make sense to add users through Samba, and have them logging in across the domain. This way it's much easier to setup their My Documents to point to the Samba server, and also allows you to easily create + control group shares if you wanted to create shared areas. They can also then login to any computer on the network without needing a local account. Is always best to think about expandability for the future :)

Backups should easily taken care of with a decent tape drive. It can be a fiddly under Linux though. Maybe a simple RAID-1 setup would be okay without going for something more complicated so that in the event of a disk failure, at least there's a second disk to immeadiately fall back. You should have enough storage space with 20Gb/user at those levels.

Thanks for your advice. I believe at this point they are not running on a domain. They are all on a windows workgroup. As for using Samba as a domain controller well I haven't the slightest idea how to do that but I will look into it as you raise a good point.

Thanks again.

If you are interested; the samba.org website gives good example configs and setup information. This should shine some light on the domain controller option.
http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/...samba-pdc.html

Thanks. I guess I have to find out if any of the client machines are running Windows XP home edition. If that is the case, the domain controller would go right out the window (pun intended) since I don't think they are interested in upgrading machines to professional.

If they are just using Win XP Home and you don't want the domain login functionality (and the associated upgrade costs!) you can still create a simple batch script and copy it to each machine that runs on each local login. Would still map across the correct home drives and group shares, though not quite sure how it would manage the permissions correctly. I'd guess you'd need local users + groups on the Samba machine still to control it, and then grab %username% from the Windows logon and set things up accordingly.