PCA Forums

Can anyone point me in the direction for setting up a linux file server.
I have 11 computers on a network soon to be 12 or 13 running winxp and at the moment the file server is on win98 with just documents on a seperate fat32 hard drive
I am somewhat familiar with linux not real conversant though and was thinking i need to set up a samba server but somewhere else i read said that i need to set up nfs or some such thing because its simpler.
So linux experts like doc silly any simple way of getting this going
Cheers for now

It's been a while that I played a lil with Samba. It's easy to find guides for setting up a Samba server, like this general one. There is also a nice GUI tool for Samba administration, Swat (runs on port 901, might require editing inetd to start it). I think you only need NFS when you want to easily share partitions for Unix/Linux clients. There are more setting to pay attention to, like password encryption etc, but this should be all covered in howtos easily found via google.

What you probably read about NFS being simpler applied to UNIX/Linux clients with a UNIX/Linux Server, since they usually support NFS out of the box and not SMB.

Configuring Samba is fairly straight forward. There's loads of great documentation on their website. Most newer distro's will default to everything you'll need and all you'll have to do is name the server and create shares. Oh and add users.

If you plan to run your Samba server as a PDC or such it gets more complicated. But still pretty easy. Just read the docs and remember google is your friend. :up