[LUNI] Samba?

[Martin Maney]

On Tue, Jan 23, 2007 at 04:48:02PM -0600, Richard Lynch wrote:
> For a couple hundred Word and Publish documents, most about 1 page
> long, what's a min spec?
> 
> I've got an old box sitting at home, Pentium, 128M RAM, 20G hard
> drive.  Think that would cut it?

It's overkill, really - a 486 could easily handle such lightweight file
sharing (as long as it wasn't doing anything else that would bog it
down).  While the others have a valid point about possible
unreliability, I just want to say that there's an argument the other
way, too - that vintage hardware, if it wasn't junk to begin with, is
now long past the early life failures.  You'll have to be the judge as
to whether it was used so long and hard as to be likely to wear out any
minute now.  :-/

I would suggest a different, smaller expenditure in the interests of
relaibaility - get a decent little UPS for the server, please.  I
suspect that some of the differences of opinion about the fragility of
elderly hardware hinges on actual differences caused by exposing some
samples to the untender vagaries of the AC line... though I also have
had some dire experience with temperature cycling induced failures as
well.  But that's probably beyond wishing for in an office that's
squabbling over a single '98 vintage PC...

> I know almost nothing about Windows and even less about Samba.  How
> tricky is this gonna be?...

I'd suggest you go find a good Samba howto and see if it sounds like
soemthing that you'll be comfortable with.  I think samba is pretty
easy, but then I climbed that hill long enough ago that whatever pain
there was is mostly lost to memory... possibly on purpose.  :-)

> Am I even on the right track here?

Oh yeah.

-- 
To read a book, to think it over, and to write out notes
is a useful exercise; a book which will not repay some hard thought 
is not worth publishing.  -- Maria Mitchell