I volunteer for a small charity and we are looking to have a server for our backup files. The idea is to connect by radio or cable from about 18 of our windows (XP, VISTA) PCs and laptops and perhaps even allow staff to connect to their files from home.
If we can get a 2nd hand PC from somewhere, what spec. should it have?
What kit would it need in addition to do the above?
And more to the point is there an open source SUSE OS we could use with perhaps a years paid support in case we need help to get it running, etc.?
I’m not very familiar with server hardware, so I’d rather leave that to someone with more experience to answer. But on your question of purchasing OpenSUSE with support, there is a boxed version of OpenSUSE 11.0 available. The package includes 90 days of installation support along with many other options (included below). The price for this package is $59.95. You can also download the free ISO version directly from the OpenSUSE website and use the support of the OpenSUSE Forums, along with the documentation posted on the OpenSUSE Wiki. Simply a matter of preference, but just wanted to put both options out there: the official paid support along with community support, or the solely the community support for free. The details of the paid package are listed below, along with Mirrors from the Novell website to purchase the package in different geographic locations…
90-Day Installation Support (phone or e-mail)… not available from the download site
Printed Start-up Manual
OpenOffice.org office suite—compatible with Microsoft Office
Immune to Windows viruses, spyware, and malware
Instant messaging, e-mail, and Web browsing
Powerful desktop search built-in
Hundreds of productivity applications, games, and utilities!
I’ve personally installed and played around with only the Apache2 server, but it is quite simple to install and configure. If all goes well, it can take less than 10 minutes. I hope this helps with your question, and I apologize for my lack of Server Hardware knowledge and server knowledge. I’d rather leave that to more experienced users, rather than give you wrong or damaging information. By the way, I just want to commend you for volunteering for charity work and best of luck to you and your charity!
If you just want the server to do one thing only, e.g. being a Samba server, perhaps it might be better to use one of those specialised distros, like freenas, that turn a computer into a file server. Those are designed to be easy to manage because they do only a limited set of tasks well. When used as a fileserver, the I/O capabilities of the hardware become more important than sheer computing power. Do a search for freenas and have a look through their doco and forums to see what hardware would be appropriate for the number of users and frequency of access you have.
