I've got a 2 year old Gentoo machine that got patched together using a lot of small hard drives which worked fine for what I used the machine for 2-3 years ago but the machine isn't getting used much anymore. The processor, memory & MB are all reasonably good - i5-661 & 4GB - but my laptop & VM compute server are both faster - so I was wondering what I might do with the box. I saw a Wired article last night about a guy building a NAS box using Debian which got me thinking. I've got a bunch of 1TB Green drives which would make a good base for storage so there's no cost in doing this, but I don't know anything about network attached storage that just works out of the box with Windows clients and I have NO desire (or time) to spend learning stuff that's very Windows specific.
If there is a good solution for me it needs to support both Win XP and Win 7 machine and shouldn't require anything be added to the Windows VM. Years ago I tried this basic guide: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/quick-samba-howto.xml I don't remember why but I didn't have much luck with it. However it's been updated and cleaned up a lot so maybe it's OK. Thanks in advance for any ideas. Cheers, Mark
