Hey, I am a total newbie and taking on way too much to handle at my office, but hey...it's gotta get done. Ok I just ordered a server from dell. Hopefully it will be a sweet machine. I want to load linux on to it even though both computer engineers that I know are telling me to run windows because the other three machines in my office run windows. I have a feeling that they just don't know squat about linux and so they are scarred of it. There are three things that I want to do. I want to set up the machine as a file server which I know I can do through samba. I want to backup the other machines on tape drives which I have no clue how to do or what software is best for that. And I want to host our website locally on it which naturally I would use Apache for. If anyone could help me with any suggestions for the backup or for anything else, I would really really love to run linux and laugh at the other guys when their windows machines crash and burn and eat red hat dust. Thanks guys.

Software wise, and though I've never used it, I've seen BRU utilities recommended.

http://www.tolisgroup.com/

All of what you want to do is perfectly possible and easily implementable.

First of all yes - set up samba for backup. If you can do domain logins with then win boxes then I would suggest doing it that way and use a simple script to connect home dirs.

Secondly, backup - If you are using samba I don't know why you need to backup the PCs to tape - just backup the /home partition. If you want to backup program files etc on the windows boxes for some reason then:
1) Share the drives on the win boxes
2) On linux "mkdir /mnt/backup"
3) On linux "mkdir /mnt/backup/win1" (win1 being the first windows computer - call them what you like and do this for each machine)
4) Mount the drives of each machine (permentantly or probably better - do it just before the backup is run)
5) Bakup /mnt/backup (and your /home partition)

You may also want to shut the win computers down at night when the backup is done. If so - make your backup script create a file called "shutdown" in each of the shared drives and set a script up as a scheduled task on windows to check for the presence of this file. If it exists then delete it and shutdown if not - try again in 10 mins.

Lastly, a web server - no problem at all. One thing I do suggest is chaing the DocumentRoot to being on /home. Some distros default to /var and there is usually very little space on that partition.

Post any questions you have - people on this site love to help!

A few backup programs:

Taper: http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/se...hp?query=Taper
Arkeia: http://freshmeat.net/projects/arkeia/?topic_id=137
Time Navigator: http://freshmeat.net/search?q=Time+Navigator