OT: New PC! Sorta...

[AgentZero]

I'm living in residence while I'm going to school, and there's 11 other people sharing a house with me. We all have fairly extensive collections of music & video that we share with each other, but it's currently a rather painful process, involving much CD/DVD burning, running around with USB keys, etc.

I'm thinking of making us a little server to alleviate this problem, so we can have a central location to dump all of our stuff, and access it as we need to.

I'm figuring on taking advantage of the wireless access provided to us in residence for this purpose, but I have a few questions.

Each of us can contribute around $100, so my total budget will be in the neighbourhood of $1200.

1) The OS. Since I want to maximize the amount of storage I can get, I'm thinking of a bare-bones linux distro with only a VNC type server to allow access & a rudimentary GUI. This would also have the benefit of letting me skimp a bit on other hardware, leaving more money from the budget for storage. I'm just not sure of a distro that fits this bill.

2) I want the machine to connect to the wireless network, but not have any access to/from the internet. Is there an easy way of doing this?

3) What would be the best way of getting the most storage capacity for my dollar. I'm looking for something in the 1-2TB range, and it can be stuck in a big case, so multiple HDs is not a problem.

4) Assuming I'm using SATA drives, how easy would it be to RAID together several volumes into one big one? Would I need a separate RAID controller?

5) With a server like the one I'm describing, where can I afford to skimp, and where should I invest money. Obviously graphics & sound are hardly necessary, so onboard graphics & sound, or no sound at all would do fine. I want to have a pretty reliable & zippy wireless connection, so what sort of wireless card should I look at? And what about the CPU and RAM?

Would I need a fairly hefty processor, or would a $50 Celeron suffice?

Same question with RAM. I can get 1GB of Corsair RAM for $55, but would that be enough to suit the needs of such a machine, or should I go for 2GB, or even 4GB?

I'm sure I'll come up with more, but I'll leave it at that for now and go get some sleep.

Edit: Oh, and about the VNC part, is this a good solution for a computer that's going to mainly have files copied back and forth to it? Not everyone in res is the terribly tech-savvy, so I want something that's as simple to use as possible.

[Fyron]

Note that Wifi has terrible, terrible throughput. Streaming video and copying large amounts of data over it is asking for pain. Maybe 802.11N has enough bandwidth to not suck so badly, but that would require replacing the router and all access cards (assuming they are G currently)..

1) That depends; are you wanting to have it stream media files, or just act as a file repository? Are you wanting to set this up in the common area as a media viewing platform?

2) If you have a linux-based router, you can set up some iptables (IIRC) rules to do that. Don't ask me what the rules would be specifically, though.

3) Find a deal tracker site for your country, and watch it until hdd sales occur.

4) Depends on the motherboard you use; many of them support some versions of RAID 0/1/5 these days. Make sure not to fall into the fallacy of RAID 0. With lots of drives, you should be able to do RAID 5 without much hassle.

5) You need an order of magnitude less processing power to serve content than to create it. It might be better to get a $50 Athlon than a Celeron, though. You can always get 1 GB of ram, and add more later if you need it (make sure to by 1 GB stick, not some combination of small sticks that add up to 1 GB).

edit) If you go Linux, its probably a better idea to set up Samba than VNC for copying files to the machine. You could set up a /home/share folder on the machine, then add this as a network folder to everyones desktop/my documents folder.

[dogscoff]

If you're in the states and don't have a moral objection to shopping at walmart, they are (apparently) currently selling some decent Linux PCs for about $200. The stores are sold out, but I believe you can still get them mail order. They ship with a modified Ubuntu, but you can put whatever OS you like on there (well, maybe not Vista) and that would leave you plenty of cash to upgrade the storage. No idea if they support RAID.

Alternatively, pick up an old PC second-hand box from somewhere. A PC a few years old will serve your purposes well enough, and there are tons of perfectly good PCs out there that people think are worthless because of malware/ windows rot/ OMGIt'sNotBrandNew! - find one of these for sale, check that the mobo has the features you need, haggle, buy, reformat and off you go! $1200 should be more than enough.

Old laptops can be good as servers too, because they are deigned to be power-efficient, they come with a built-in UPS, and they are often very cheap on ebay because the screen or hinge or case or keyboard is broken. This doesn't matter for a server; just plug in an external monitor/ keyboard when setting it up and then administer it remotely from there on in. Not quite as expandable as a desktop, obviously, but a couple of USB hard drives might do what you need. Search ebay for "laptop spares repair"

One more option is a dedicated NAS solution, something like the Linksys SLU2. This is probably less hassle than setting up and maintinaing an entire PC, but less fun, less of a learning experience and probably less flexible.

[AstralWanderer]

AgentZero said:
2) I want the machine to connect to the wireless network, but not have any access to/from the internet. Is there an easy way of doing this?

Any linux distro should include a firewall which you can configure to limit traffic to your local network only (by default, most local networks use the 192.168.*.* address range which is reserved for private use - those addresses should never appear on the Internet itself so limiting traffic to that address range should work).

Your wireless router should include a firewall also, so if you have the ability to configure that it should be possible to block access to/from your server from the Internet. Wireless networks are subject to eavesdropping so try to ensure that you use the best encryption possible (WPA if you can).

AgentZero said:
3) What would be the best way of getting the most storage capacity for my dollar. I'm looking for something in the 1-2TB range, and it can be stuck in a big case, so multiple HDs is not a problem.

Wait till after Christmas - prices always drop then.

AgentZero said:
4) Assuming I'm using SATA drives, how easy would it be to RAID together several volumes into one big one? Would I need a separate RAID controller?

No, as Linux has the ability to handle RAID in software (see Ubuntu Help: FakeRAID HowTo). Getting a motherboard BIOS that offers RAID is of no benefit and can complicate issues. A dedicated RAID controller may offer better disk speeds, but your bottleneck is going to be with the wireless connection anyway so it would offer no benefit.

AgentZero said:
5) With a server like the one I'm describing, where can I afford to skimp, and where should I invest money...I want to have a pretty reliable & zippy wireless connection, so what sort of wireless card should I look at? And what about the CPU and RAM?

Well, wireless is going to be the main speed problem. You could work around this by using wired connections for as many PCs as possible (so fewer have to share the wireless bandwidth) and maybe try adding a second wireless network (ensuring that its router is configured to use a channel at least 5 away from the main router) and configuring some PCs to use that instead.

As far as wireless standards go, 802.11a should offer the best performance (802.11g has the same speed in theory but is vulnerable to interference from 802.11b, Bluetooth, HomeRF, videosenders, microwave ovens and anything else using the unregulated 2.4Ghz frequency band) but will cost more. 802.11n may be worth looking into once the standard is firmed up, but "pre-N" routers command a hefty price premium at the moment, with no guarantee that they will work with future standards-compliant equipment.

Wireless Standards - 802.11b 802.11a 802.11g and 802.11n has more information about the pros and cons of the different technologies.

AgentZero said:Would I need a fairly hefty processor, or would a $50 Celeron suffice?

I'd agree with the advice given above - processor speed is of relatively small importance. RAM would matter more, but again with a wireless connection is unlikely to be a bottleneck.

One gotcha however is going to be Windows Vista - Microsoft changed its printer/file sharing so it doesn't work with Samba by default - see Getting Vista to work with Samba for details. Samba would be a better choice than VNC since it is designed for file-sharing (VNC is more for remote management) and should appear just like an extra drive to your users.

[AgentZero]

The server won't be streaming any audio/video or anything crazy like that, it's just going to be for storing files. When we want stuff, we just copy it to our computer and run it from there.

And as much as I'd like to have a wired connection, most of the people in residence have laptops, so wired connections wouldn't work too well. Although I'm pretty sure the wired & wireless connections are on the same network, so I suppose I could theoretically have the server wired, and have people connect to it wirelessly, but of course that wouldn't do much to reduce the bottleneck...

I looked at Samba, and it seems to fit the bill, and the most recent version seems to have added support to work with Vista, according to the link above...

[Fyron]

If it isn't even going to be used for playing back files locally, you don't even need a pentium 4/athlon level CPU for the job (though you'll have trouble finding anything with SATA or lots of IDE ports with a P3 or something )... Just figure out what CPU you can get for a motherboard with the drive connectors you need, that draws the minimum amount of power. No point in putting in a power-hungry CPU (I'm looking at you Athlon/Sempron and Pentium/Celeron) to just act as a file server; might as well minimize the electric requirements, for the lowest cost of running it. Look into micro-atx style motherboards/processors; some sort of Pentium M CPU would be great. You can still use such systems for local playback if you need to, naturally.

[AgentZero]

Well, the cheapest CPU that I can find is a Celeron but it fits into a LGA775, so I can use motherboards that support SATA and so forth.

I'm still rather lost in the OS department though. If people are going to be connecting through Samba, it doesn't even really need much of a GUI really, although it'd be nice to have one to set the thing up...

[AstralWanderer]

AgentZero said:
The server won't be streaming any audio/video or anything crazy like that, it's just going to be for storing files. When we want stuff, we just copy it to our computer and run it from there.

The network load will depend upon file sizes and these can get pretty large for por..uh..video. If usage is likely to be frequent, then wireless bandwidth (54Mb/s will translate to 5MB/s at best - say 2-300KB/s per person if everyone is accessing at the same time, allowing for contention) may need some attention.

Streaming audio/video would likely be less demanding of bandwidth than file transfers and users are less likely to complain about waiting.

Also do include a backup solution in your budget (a couple of extra HDs with a cron script running dd on a daily or weekly basis would be simplest).