[seanb]

Hello everyone.

I'll be setting up a file server for our 10 person office soon, and I have a couple questions.

Right now I'm planning on using a 450mhz G4 Powermac, will that be powerful enough for several people to access files at the same time?

I'm thinking I should pick up a gigabit ethernet card to put in there, and a gigabit hub. Almost all of the office is on 100BaseT. Would a dual port gigabit ethernet be worth it? How does one go about using both ports for one protocol in OS10.3?

Will standard 10.3.3 be powerful enough to serve up files, or should we go with 10.3 Server? For the most part, everyone will be accessing a large pool of public files, but there may be one or two private accounts set up.

Sorry for all the questions. I'm taking a 5 week long trip to Russia in a couple weeks, and I need to get a server up and running before I leave. Any and all help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Sean

[C.J. Moof]

Sure, it's plenty. I used a G4/400 with OS9, AppleShare IP and a couple of big ATA drives for file serving for years before we got an Xserve and a RAID 5. It was always up to the task. Best thing you can do is dump a bunch of good quality RAM in it.

Standard OS X should be enough for this, you're not looking for QTSS, Netboot and hosting multiple web servers- just handing out files. That's not very processor intensive.

You might find the shareware (freeware?) Sharepoints a useful tool for this project. It exists to define what is and isn't shared and with whom from an OS X machine.

Getting everyone on GigE would be the best performance for your effort. There's no point in having a server with 2 Gig ports enabled when the clients are all limited to 100B. You'd need over half of them simultaneously doing big file transfers before the benefit of port #2 is seen. Between my xserve and a G5 I can move about 35 megs/sec- meaning even the biggest image transfers don't take very long. on my powerbook, the internal drive is the limitng factor- it can only write 20 megs/sec on the xserve.

We have an Asante GX5-1600 switch. It's just worked since the day I put it in, 4 months ago. It just works, and can be had for a fair price.

[OreoCookie]

And especially if you share files over the net. Your computer will always be fast enough to saturate the connection …_