* Alan & Kerry Shrimpton ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) spake thusly: > Hi, > > At work we have one file server with NT4 I think as the OS. One mail server > firewall running Linux. (Hence why I am playing around with it at home). > We have 3 other computers connected to the network running Windows98. The > rest of us use laptops (6 off) which we plug in when we are in the office. > > Now work is talking of upgrading their file server. They have a quote in > like 10k New Zealand using the old NT software. I would love the chance to > put in a Linux file server but don't feel confident enough. > > What advice can you give me? How much knowledge does someone really need to > know to make this happen and ask work if I can do it?
A lot. Don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise. (That doesn't mean you can't learn this stuff as you go along; just be prepared to learn a lot.) > I would appreciate some input on this but I think the project is probably > too big for me. They do want mirror disks in case a hard drive crashes but > don't think they need to go the whole hog with raid control. Yes they do. I recently moved moved our NFS/SMB-shared directories from internal (SCSI) hard drives to a RAID box. CPU I/O wait time went from 16% down to 4% (that's on a 2-CPU 2Gb RAM UltraSPARC). Of course if your fileserver doesn't do anything except serving files, you can live with high wio time... YMMV. ...Then with > mirror disks do you really need a tape backup? You always need backup. At least two. Dima
