On Friday 21 September 2007 16:24:24 Les Mikesell wrote: > John Bowden wrote: > > I have a Gygabyte GA-7N400 PRO2 with a 2.6 mHz Athlon cpu. I want to set > > up a central file storage for 2/3 users using 6/7 machines. A mixture of > > win2k, XP and various Linux distros (my home network). It will be used to > > store files, (docs, music and DVD ) for all of these machines, print > > server, (two ink-jets), mail server and later on a myth tv set up. Would > > SAMBA be the best option for the file and print serving ? > > The mother board has 2 X IDE channels, 2 X IDE channels with raid and 2 X > > SATA raid channels, that's up to 10 hard drive devices. The IDE raid chip > > is a GigaRaid IT8212F chipset. It supports raid 0 or raid 1 and raid 0 + > > 1 and JBOD. The SATA raid is a Silicon Image Sil3512. It supports Raid 0 > > or 1. Would I get better speed performance using the chips to manage the > > raid or using software raid? > > Oh and I will be using the CentOS 5 install dvd. Any advice from the list > > would be appreciated. > > If you are interested in an appliance-like setup for serving files, > printers, email and some other things, you might like the SME server > from http://www.contribs.org. It's based on centos code but with a > kickstart install and completely web based administration. It will > automatically install as raid1 if it sees 2 disks, or as a 'broken' raid > set if you only have one so you can easily add the mirror later (a very > nice trick). Since the configuration is all built by web/perl scripts > it is hard to do additional customization, but in a multiple machine > setup you might find it easy to take advantage of its features. I will have a closer look at this - looks interesting -- Guy Fawkes, the only man to enter the house's of Parliament with honest intentions, (he was going to blow them up!) Registered Linux user number 414240