Hi all,

Just need a little advide our office has grown to around 6 people now with constant sharing of files and emails coming in and out at an astounding rate.

We are needing to upgrade the hardware and invest in a small server and network system.

I basically need to know what is the recommended way of connecting a max of 10 PC's to a server for email and file/printer sharing?

Also what would you recommend for data storage and network configuration.
I can provide a few more details if needed.

Many thanks in advance.

 

I would personally use a system running Linux or a BSD as the resources this uses are lower than Windows and does not require the maintenance a Windows server does... POSIX standard systems such as Linux also cope with being hit hard or placed under heavy loads and demands far better than Windows server and is super stable which is why the majority of webservers run these Operating Systems... this is without mentioning security issues and viral issues.

I would personally look at getting your ISP to setup up a static IP address which would give tyou the opportunity at a later date to run a webserver and host your own site without increasing costs or allow easy secure access to people working from home.

With regards to storage I would simply use multiple large capacity drives in a raid mirroring configuration to ensure data integrity or at least do automated back ups to a DAT drive

The network would just be set up as a standard dynamic ip configuration with the server supporting the networked printers

My personal favorite Linux for servers is FREE and found @ http://www.ubuntu.com/server

If I was doing this I would build a system using a SMP (Symmetric Multiprocessing) motherboard such as the KT8 Master2 Far which is in the ATX board format and as such fits in a traditional PC case thus reducing costs.. I would run this with 2 AMD Opterons of around 1.5 ghz and 4gb of memory I would run on these SATA hard disk in a RAID mirroring configuration and would run Linux on this with Samba for the windows shares and probably evauluate the mail server depending upon loads (although all Linux mail servers can do spam filtering and virus scanning) I would then just set this up as a system using a static IP and plug it into a router based network.

http://www.hypexr.org/linux_mail_server.php <--- mail server setup

Although Linux can be a pain in the ass to set up the fact that you neither have the licence issues or costs and do not have to spend the rest of its life maintaining it ensure that its fantastic for tasks where stability and reliability is a must... why do you think web servers use it ?

 

For a ten user network, you can get away with just whipping a basic server from Dell for a few hundred quid (we bought some at work for less than 300).

I'm not a Windows advocate, but if it aint broke, don't fix it. If you have experience with Unix, Linux *nix, go that way - you'll feel better for it

Otherwise, stick with what you know. If you can, try and find someone who'll install Windows 2000 Server - it's smaller, and less lardy than 2003, but just as capable. For what it seems like you need to do, anything else would be a waste. In fact, if you're gonna have no more than 10 pcs, you could just get away with another copy of Windows XP or 2000 Professional, as they have a limit of 10 concurrent connections.

All you need is a big disk (better to have two, in RAID 1 to keep your data safe), and a nice high capacity tape drive...and lots of tapes!

Get yourself a nice 12/24 port 10/100MB HP switch, with a 1Gb port (and 1Gb network card in the server!) so that all the clients have a pretty much guaranteed 100MB link to the server.

Got plenty more advice if you need it.

 

excellent advise so far any more is always appreciated as i know there's always different ways to fulfil certain expectations. We need a fast data transfer rate as some of our files are over 2Gb in size.

Thanks

 

don't run anything wireless then and run good quality Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) or faster across the LAN

 

Very valid point.... if running a Windows server I would most certainly look towards 2000 server before 2003 for the reasons stated above.

Always good to be reminded of things

 

Does anyone have any experiance with SBS 2003? Does OWA which could be good..