As I work and play at home I have a number of devices and storage requirements that I would like to rationalise.

Ideally I would like large amounts of shared storage (I have about 2TB available on USB drives) two shared printers and a shared scanner.

I have a Vista desktop machine of reasonable power (about four years old); a Macbook Pro (so access to a Time Machine disk would be handy); Sony Vaio; an IBM T-series (client machine) and various visiting machines, usually Wintel.

There is a wireless network, although the Netgear ADSL modem and router are nowhere near the desktop and can't be.

Is there a way of building this into a network that can provide the services I describe above?

Can I turn the Vista machine into a server? And will it support the Macbook effectively?

Should I upgrade the desktop to an iMac and be done with these alien Wintel machines?

Thoughts on a postcard please!

 

Ideally if you are planning on a central server I would defo make sure it's connected by network cable for the speed and consistency issue, I know wireless has come along a bit now but for a server I would defo cable it.
Could connect to usb drives to it also

You could then connect the printers to the server and share them from that assuming the server will always be on.

Macs will conect to smb shares but you may have to jig the NTFS permissions to get it to work corrently, and connect by IP address not Netbios name (that may work on newer Mac OS's, I haven't checked). Server of course would be hard coded with a fixed IP address, not put on dhcp.

What OS to run on the server? If it was me I'd stick server 2k8 on it but then I'm a geek and many will shoot me down in flames saying you don't need to. Windows home server springs to mind, or a Linux box even (check out freenas FreeNAS [FreeNAS]), or if you are using it for essentially a filestore a seperate NAS box and the hard drives in that.

So my answer is a bit vague but some pointers at least

 

Hmmmm

http://www.cclonline.com/product-inf...id=0&tid=n2b1d

I was looking at this, with 2 x 2TB drives it could be one solution ?

dunx

 

Looks nice - thanks dunx

 

I quite like the idea of getting a Mac Mini with SL Server. Could convert a second hand one and then utilise my existing storage, or persuade my business to buy a spanking new one