Setting up a server

Linux users will never change. They're almost like Apple users, one step down from technical evangelism with an ego to match. Only they would take the meaning behind my words to paint them in a negative light.
Woah there buddy. Have another read of my posts and you'll see I clearly state Windows is a viable option. I'm just pointing out the plus sides to Linux, plus sides which often go unnoticed by many. You want to use Windows then be my guest, I'm certainly not one of the "Linux is 1337 and everyone should use it for everything" crowd. I'm one of the "use the best tool for the job" crowd, and as such I'm pointing out why Windows isn't always the best tool for the job.

If you think it is, then sorry but I'm afraid you fall squarely into the category that you point at the Linux crowd (and the Mac one - where did they come into it?!) Serious question, have you ever used Linux for any serious server work? I.e. not just casual home use. My work often involves setting up various servers and hammering them to high heaven - I use Linux as a base OS because from experience I simply find it the best tool for the job. I'm no fanboy, if Windows held up better I'd be using that without a doubt.

My father. Windows NT on a Pentium Pro 200.
That's all well and good if you're using it in a trusted, low traffic environment, but that's an awfully old OS now. Exposing it to an untrusted environment would be silly, and would you really be happy hammering that hardware with an old version of NT on there?! The point I was making is I can run some of the latest Linux distros, fully patched and secure, just tweaked a little on stupidly low end hardware, and it holds up against some serious hammering. Even the flashy Beryl desktop effects can run perfectly well with KDE on machines that XP can sometimes struggle on...

A report issued recently shows that they both have security pitfalls, so saying one is better than the other is foolish and in some cases, dangerous to your client(s).
Can you provide a link to this report? I'd be interested to read it. Saying that they "both have security pitfalls" is a bit of a vague statement in itself - Windows 7 and Windows 95 both have security pitfalls, but would you feel equally safe using them both online?!

My point stands. You cannot compare Windows to Linux like you could when Linux was getting its start. Linux is now just as much of a detriment to security and stability as Windows is.
Linux is now better than it was when it started, exponentially better on all counts - believe me trying to install Mandrake or Redhat back in the day was a flippin nightmare, and that was just the installer! And geez, just as much of a detriment to security and stability as Windows - what makes you say that?! It'd be nice to have some examples to back these points up, or at least show where you're coming from. People using Windows still gladly accept they have to log in as an account with admin rights whenever they want to do anything, or hit the "allow" button on a UAC prompt constantly whenever it pops up because "that's just what you do." Besides, UAC is pretty fatally flawed anyway. Compare that to Linux's security model where, with any intelligence you NEVER log in as root and only ever su / sudo to root level access briefly when a particular application requires it (which, unlike Windows, it rarely does.) If you want me to explain more about why it's better, then I gladly will... but in short it was designed from the ground up as a much more fine grained access system with much less potential for rogue processes to trash any important files.

I distrust anyone who says it is still better than Windows. In some cases, absolutely, but not on all the fronts people are still living in the past for.
I'm not sure what you mean by living in the past - Linux has become much more of a contender in recent years, not less. You seem to be shouting it down as much as you can for server work which IMO is one of its biggest strengths. If you hate it for server work, what would you say it's better for? I distrust anyone who says any OS is flat out better than any other for any possible task. Despite Ubuntu getting there, Windows is still more user friendly, has better support and is quicker to set up in the vast majority of cases. For some work I'd say Solaris was far better than Linux - in fact if it had better support then I'd use it over Linux pretty much hands down!

If you want to shout Linux down for a particular reason and give evidence of why you're shouting it down, same with any OS, then please back up these reasons with examples. I've stated hard reasons why I don't rush to Windows for server work and generally steer clear of it, all of these backed up by using Windows and finding these problems or drawbacks first hand when directly comparing to a Linux machine. If you can produce similar examples and links then please, please do - I always enjoy a good debate where people are quoting proper articles and citing real use cases, I think both sides can learn a lot from that. At present though I'm just hearing lots of unsubstantiated, vague points with no proper backing - not really a lot of good to anyone.
 
Thanx for the replied. I would try out WHS but I really cant afford it (im 15) and even if I could I dont really want to spend that money on an experimental project like this. Thanx Anyway. Ill probably go for ubuntu server edition and see what I can do with that.

Thanx again.

Aaron
 
If you guys are going to nitpick the finer points of what I said, be my guest. Years of operational time in a private residence without any sort of substantial backup power system other than a UPS, sometimes years isn't possible.
ok, uptime means nothing really anyway... it's the reason for restart!

you can't fend against power outage but if you have to restart all the time your service is unavailable.

you'll never get five nines of uptime if you're restarting every second tuesday of the month.

for some people I guess like yourself, running a server at home is just so you can serve things, in which case windows home server is great, others might think that if they've got a box on taking up all that juice they may as well turn it into a learning environment too... (incidentally they are the ones who will be beating you to a job when it comes down to who's got experience with a server OS).

[quotet]Linux users will never change. They're almost like Apple users, one step down from technical evangelism with an ego to match. Only they would take the meaning behind my words to paint them in a negative light. [/quote]
that's not what I was trying to do...

My father. Windows NT on a Pentium Pro 200. He uses it for everything I use my 2k8 box for. I just choose to play with the latest OS because I can.
there are hundreds, (if not thousands) of security holes and bugs in windows NT4, -that will never be fixed as it's out of support...
could you honestly recommend using this as a server OS? I couldn't.

incidentally, I'm also playing with the latest OS on my 200MHz machine that consumes that whopping 9 watts of power.

and that's the point...
when you're a real business with real servers inside real data centres running real infrastructure.
I.e you NEED good uptime, you NEED efficiency (because you pay PER WATT for power) then you start looking at Linux.

for a home server windows home server is cool... but it's not going to get you anything past just having a home server.
for a chance to get some good as near to real world experience as you can get, Linux is a good choice.

My point stands. You cannot compare Windows to Linux like you could when Linux was getting its start. Linux is now just as much of a detriment to security and stability as Windows is. A report issued recently shows that they both have security pitfalls, so saying one is better than the other is foolish and in some cases, dangerous to your client(s). Linux was created out of a perceived necessity and grew into its own product. I love some of the applications that it can be used in, but I distrust anyone who says it is still better than Windows. In some cases, absolutely, but not on all the fronts people are still living in the past for.

how is it not better than windows? and what are you arguing? are you saying that they are actually the same? or that windows is better?
 
Let me turn off the nitro here, and try this again without letting it get out of hand.

The issue I have is that people still refer to old standbys about Linux's stability compared to Windows.

I don't want to get into an Intel vs AMD, Chevy vs Ford thing. I may have already done it, but I didn't really want to - just trying to say that people need to expand a little once and a while and that living on old assumptions sucks.

Remember when everyone thought nothing would come of AMD, and then they did something called Athlon? Or when Intel shed the P4 and brought out Conroe?

Things change, software is no different, especially operating systems.

As a piece of software that sees millions of PCs versus the relatively small (in contrast) number of PCs that Linux touches, more folks are quick to judge the Microsoft side of things.

Call me a brown noser, but I attribute my career to Microsoft's legacy. Regardless of which OS I use, they're the reason I'm doing what I do today. I have seen Windows servers with uptimes rivaling those of Linux systems, with just as much security as those Linux boxes when set up correctly.

The bottom line is that software is coded by humans, and until there's a programmer with a perfect record out there, all software written will have bugs, holes, patches, reboots, downtime, and irritations.

But I still have a major issue when someone says Windows isn't stable when I have seen, and can prove, otherwise.

Maybe I'm just biased since I was one of the few people to get Windows ME to be stable for long periods of time, when others couldn't. I have proof too: http://www.amdarchive.com/remote/cognisurf_connect.gif

Just open minds a little bit more. It sucks when people are close minded.

That's all I was really trying to say.
 
I'll slip in here cause i'm looking to do the same thing. I've got a box i'm going to stick in the garage. It's sole purpose being to serve my laptop and main rig with browsing and file storing facilities; I want to browse the internet via the server, not directly on my other machines. I'm gonna stick a 300mb/s PCI wireless card in the box to connect to the router. Just like the OP I want full control.

I was looking at Ubuntu Home Server to do all this but wanted to know if it will serve my Windows machines?
 
By browsing the internet via the server, do you mean you want to set up a proxy server on the machine in the garage and route all traffic through there?

Ubuntu would be fine. Samba will manage the file side of things to windows no problem, and I'd set up Squid as a proxy (this just works over HTTP so is essentially OS agnostic.)
 
By browsing the internet via the server, do you mean you want to set up a proxy server on the machine in the garage and route all traffic through there?

Yea spot on. The idea is that the server will have the necessary protection and I can ditch the AV software on my dinosaur laptop. Thats what i'm thinking anyway.

Ubuntu would be fine. Samba will manage the file side of things to windows no problem, and I'd set up Squid as a proxy (this just works over HTTP so is essentially OS agnostic.)

Excellent. I'll look into this. Will a standard PCI Wi-Fi 300 mb/s card be ok in the server or should I hard wire it to my router?
 
Excellent. I'll look into this. Will a standard PCI Wi-Fi 300 mb/s card be ok in the server or should I hard wire it to my router?
A standard wi-fi card will probably be fine, but check the driver support first. Personally I'd hard wire it in if you can - might be a hassle to set up but just makes it more reliable in the long run.
 
I myself used FreeNAS, a fairly new free OS for Home Servers, and its worked extremely well. The setup itself was fairly bland and a little unintuative, but within 20 minutes it was recognized on all Network computers; it also, as I've done, allows you to set up an Itunes databas, playable directly from Itunes, and a Bittorrent download manager for downloading quickly and effficiently straight to the server.
 
FreeNAS is good for what it does (I actually found the setup ridiculously easy when I did it!) and I'm sure it's been out for years - I last looked at it around 2 years ago and it was going strong then. If you're looking for a quick and easy solution that just serves files / acts as an DAAP client then great, but it's quite limited in its extensibility. If you subsequently decide you want your box to act as a mythtv backend for instance, you're stuffed.
 
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