Phoenix Network Forums

From a long time ago I wanted to set Up a File server-but i've always had some thougths putting me behid-here i want to ask you for help and some answers of course

this file server will be storing mainly mp3s-Legal of course.
planned on a single 300GB HD for now.

1) What Distro would you personally preffer for this task and why? (or OS)

2) What DB do you think would be needed for this amount of space and requests?

3) What file system would be more siutable for this task?
- Do you think i should be raiding this 300GB onto another 300GB?

4) What processor do you think, will be needed for this server, to handle just single user requests?

any help would be greatly appreciated.
10x for the time.

I run a small server for file sharing with my friend, and since I first installed linux slackware on my server I can't change it!!! It's the best!

I like how you numbered your questions, but I'm answering out of order.

4) For a single client on a 100mbit LAN, an old Pentium will do the job. The whole 100mbit/s probably won't be used most of the time. For mp3s, you won't notice the difference between 100mbit and gigabit until you watch 300gb of data go across the LAN at once. Getting proper gigabit speeds takes a fair bit of effort in getting the buses and hard disks fast enough, and requires a modern (Pentium 4 era at least) processor. http://forums.overclockers.com.au will help you better than I can; perhaps try the Internet/Networking forum there.

3) I would recommend RAID1 as a backup precaution if you can afford twice as many hard drives. I have seen it to work well as a safety net. I have seen it save vital data and the owner of the data was very pleased. You could try two different brands of hard drives to partially protect against bad build quality.

RAID0 is only useful if you find that hard disk speed is what is limiting your transfer rates (which won't matter if you're only serving up mp3s one-by-one or streaming audio). Since RAID0 arguable introduces a number of extra riskiness, I would suggest that if you use RAID0, use RAID1 as well.

Do you have 300gb of data to store? If not, I would suggest two smaller hard drives with some kind of RAID.

I would also suggest that you keep the gigabyte:dollar ratio in mind when purchasing hard drives.

If you are going to have a 300gb database, you will want to check out the man pages for the ext3 and reiserfs tools to optimise the filesystem for large files.

2) Are you planning on storing mp3s in a database? I'm wondering why you would do this, apart from maybe searching efficiently. Can you please tell what software you plan to use for that?

For the database itself, I recommend MySQL. It has lots of support and is open-source. When people use proprietery databases, it is usually for guaranteed support, brand name, and scaling. You do not have a scaling problem: despite the potential 300gb size of your database, scaling problems come in when many users start making many requests. A single user will not cause enough load to warrant anything other than the MySQL you can download for free and set up using free manuals.

-pcweirdo.

Thank you very much pcweirdo for the rich information you gave me.It is very Usefull and will help me a lot for the file server i want to set up- i still didn't decide what kind of software will use-will do soon.You are right about the efficiency as well.
Thanks again.

alkaios wrote:Thank you very much pcweirdo for the rich information you gave me.It is very Usefull and will help me a lot for the file server i want to set up- i still didn't decide what kind of software will use-will do soon.You are right about the efficiency as well.
Thanks again.

I can give you a few pointers about software, based on what I've done at home. My file server isn't really for mp3s at the moment, but it does hold my brother's photos while he works on them.

Samba is perfect in my house because all the clients in the house are Windows XP. To Photoshop and Winamp, Samba shares are a lot like local filesystems. They can run searches, open folders in explorer, everything that's nice.

NFS, FTP, HTTP and WebDAV are various other ways to share a folder, but they don't enjoy the same support from Windows. If you're running Linux clients, you can mount network filesystems with a lot more flexibility, so Samba doesn't have the same advantage.

There are some music-specific server software packages available, so that rather than point your mp3 player software at a file, you play a stream off the server; often you can get a pretty HTTP GUI through which you tell it what songs to play. I haven't used them, but the fundamental pitfall I can see with them is that some user's prefer their Winamp/XMMS/etc controls rather than opening up a web browser to change songs.

I hope I helped a little.
-pcweirdo.

That was really more than helpfull info pcweirdo.I am new here but I see that forum has really nice people arround who like to help.Really lucky to be here.
Appreaciate it.