Re: [seul-edu] Samba CD server...

[Doug Loss <dloss@suscom.net>]

Ryan Booz wrote:

> Over at school doing some work and talking with the man that approves
> money.  We've talked all year about setting up a CD tower with say 6-7
> CD-ROMs.  Looks like we could probably do it financially.  My question
> is, what are my bare minimums on the system.  It won't have a tremendous
> amount of load at any one time, I could see maybe two or three students
> accessing it at a time.  Performance issues I should worry about?  Any
> thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

I've been looking at this question for a day or so, and I think Nick Lopez
is right: it's simplest and probably has the best performance to toss
another hard drive or two onto a Linux system, copy all the CDs over there,
and then set up those filesystems as network shares.  7 CDs would only
amount to ~4.65 GB; I see drives twice that size going for under US$100 on
eBay.  Mike's right too--you don't need a screaming CPU for file serving,
but a fast network connection is a good idea.  If you'll have a lot of
people accessing these things a fair amount of RAM for caching wouldn't hurt
either, but with 2-3 people at a time I don't think that will be a big deal.

So I'd look at whatever used Pentium- or Pentium II-class system is handy,
with at least 32MB RAM and a good ethernet card (100 Mbps if your network
can use it).  Video is a don't-care, as is a backup system (as long as
you're just serving CD files, you can always reinstall the OS and reload the
data from the originals).  For the usage you talk about, IDE drives should
be fine.  For heavier usage I'd investigate SCSI, but I won't automatically
say that would be the way to go without more knowledge.  If you can't put
this together for US$700 or less, I'll be very surprised.

--
Doug Loss                 God is a comedian playing
Data Network Coordinator  to an audience too afraid
Bloomsburg University     to laugh.
dloss@bloomu.edu                Voltaire