setting up server help

[Athlon2K15]

i have an older rig setting around..p4 with 512mb of ram..but has a 300gb hard drive in it..so i want to set it up as a server,to keep my music,pictures,and other files on....so can anyone tell me how i would go about doing this..should i use windows xp or windows server 2003? i have a netgear router mr814v3..if that helps..

 

[Deleted member 3]

First of all, the system is overkill as just a fileserver, so don't worry about that.

You can use basically any Windows or Linux version, I'd go for Windows since the system can easy handle its tasks and therefor easy management is nice to have.

The most user friendly way to access your files is by mounting a Windows share. Right click the desired drive or folder and select share, you can give the share a name here and select access rights per user or group.

You can access the share by entering \\serverip\sharename in your explorer. You can then click map network drive to have a driveletter point to that share, from then on you can access it like a normal harddrive.

Alternatively you could use Linux and Samba or an FTP server under whatever OS you prefer.


You router connects your LAN to the Internet, it has nothing to do with the internal LAN. You could share your files using FTP (I prefer bulletproof FTP server) and then forward ports 21 to the server, that way you could access files via the internet. Windows filesharing is not recommended in this case.