I am planning on putting together a file server for our office to store all of our primary workfiles and backup images on, but I'm thinking that I might want to run a really stable Linux build instead of WinXP for security and stability reasons.

Stupid idea? Hard to get everything to work together? Any tips on doing this? I've set up a Linux box before, but never as a server on a network, and never with WinXP machines.

1/16/2006 1:00:50 PM

samba isn't all that secure on any platform without other security measures but I do that exact thing right now. I've had good luck with gentoo and slackware as far as stability go, security is really up to the user. If you don't want the server to do anything else, check out the really small distros like DSL.

1/16/2006 1:08:25 PM

how do you configure samba? (i'm a linux idiot) I had a friend set it up. I can share folders but I can't access them from windows. When I type \\servername\sharename into the addres bar I get a login prompt but no user/pass combination works in it.

1/16/2006 1:12:48 PM

look through the gentoo documentation, it's very complete and mostly isn't distro specific

1/16/2006 1:17:28 PM

Thanks for the info, mang...

1/16/2006 2:14:09 PM

Samba has a GUI add-on that will let you do all the configs through a web panel.

I used that to set up mine

Google it

1/16/2006 9:36:51 PM

if its a windows domain i dont know why you'd waste time with lunix when theres DFS

altho i suppose you could add the linux share into DFS.

Its still not any more secure than windows.

[Edited on January 17, 2006 at 9:58 AM. Reason : .]

1/17/2006 9:54:23 AM