[CentOS] Central file server advice please

[John Bowden]

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

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