First, sorry for my english and difficulties to explain what I'm looking for.

At home we are 5 users. Regularly 6 laptops are used. 3 windows, one Debian, one Ubuntu and one OSX. In addition there is one iMac, one win XP and one Ubuntu box.

A lot of music, movies, images etc... are used across several or all of these computers. But USB-disks are not the ideal solution here...

I have an old server tower where I have put in a new powesupply, motherboard, RAM etc etc.... and 4TB of disk space.

What is the ideal thing to put on this box. Sohuld I use FreeNAS or something like this, or should i just set up a Debian Server? I have never used NAS, but a debian server is no problem.

I also want to use som kind of media-pc together with this solution.
And it should be possible to reach it form the outside.

Anu good ideas and recomendations?

Although I am not from the QNAP systems, I personally perfer using QNAP NAS. It is Debian based also. I am using it for two yrs. No issue at all.
http://www.qnap.com/

Cheer

Freenas should be a great solution. For some reason I had a lot of problem with a version that had iSCSI target. Freenas is really a pre-made solution just for what you want.

From an electrical use point of view the qnap's tend to use something like 4 to 30 watts. You may find it difficult to come close to that with a full time server.

openfiler is another solution
if your company is looking for support

A robust network attached storage system will step up the process of storage solution in any environment in an organized, simple and cost-effective manner. While there are many storage devices such as portable hard drives and desktop hard drives that add to the storage space of your laptops or desktops, using a NAS server will consolidate the network and adds better utility to the external hard drives.

Yeah Openfiler is nice. I personally have one deployment and its working great. Easy to access and maintain and easily integrates into Windows AD environment as well.