The task: This last week I decided to take an extra computer off the shelf and make it into a file/print/http server. The file sharing will be so we don't have a copy of all our music and movies on each computer, and to make the 300GB USB disk accessable to everyone. We have a laser printer (HP LaserJet 5L) and an inkjet, and we want both computers to be able to access them easily. The http will be mostly just for Gallery2 right now. When we live out of Wymount, somewhere with not as restrictive broadband it will probably host my web pages too.
The factors: I mostly just wanted it to work and didn't really feel like plaing with config files etc. If anyone is trying to make a home server, maybe this e-mail will be of help. Any distro can do the job, since all these tasks use open source tools. The factors then are how easy it is to get it working, and how reliable it is once it's up. Background needed: I've set up Apache several times, and Cups once or twice. I've never set up Samba file sharing before though. I'm not afraid of editing config files, but I like it when they come with good defaults or at least good comments and man pages. Clark Connect -- http://www.clarkconnect.com/ I first tried "ClarkConnect" which had some great GUI tools to set up the features I mentioned. However, it's abilities stopped there. It's based on CentOS, but apt for RPM required a ClarkConnect account to access their server, and yum wasn't installed. I want to be able to expand this server in the future, so I decided that ClarkConnect wasn't for me. If you want an easy to set up server at the expense of features, this is a good option, in my opinion. Cups "just worked" via the web interface Apache "just worked" as well. SUSE -- http://opensuse.org I've been meaning to try Suse for a while, and have heard it has great GUI tools, so I thought I'd try it. Yast2 is an incredible tool, but I couldn't get the permissions correct when sharing a folder. I could connect to it from OSX, but it was read-only. The online tutorials I found were for Suse 9.3 (?) and differed enough from Suse 10 to not work correctly. Cups "just worked" via the web interface Apache "just worked" as well. Debian -- http://debian.org I grabbed Debian stable, and installed the 2.6 kernel using the businesscard.iso. I chose the relavant server options near the end of the install. The /etc/samba/smb.conf file was very thouroghly commented, and mentioned the included help files which were also installed. The help files had step-by-steps for several common scenarios including sharing a folder with authentication, sharing it to guests, including read-only and read-write variants. Cups was set to only allow configuration via the web interface from localhost:631, but as soon as I added my subnet (192.168.0.*) I could do it from my other computers. The server isn't going to get X since it's working so well without it. Conclusions/Lessons Learned: Don't go for the GUI way out when the easy way out is on the command line. If you're willing to sacrifice utility for ease of use, there are some fine options available. Essentially you give up controll, so that the distro creators can make more assumptions and their tools will work more easily. If you're willing to do just a little more work, you can get a lot more functionality. Debian is always a good choice. -- Michael Moore ------------------------------- www.stuporglue.org -- Donate your used computer to a student that needs it. -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
