Yesterday i brought home my employer's old server as they have had theirs upgraded to a newer model, so i took it off their hands so i could use to to store central information for the 3 computers on our network. Now i have not got the faintest idea of how to set this thing up, what operating system to install on this thing, how to set this thing up as a server and was wondering if someone could give me some guidance. I have 3 computers all connected to a Router via standard ethernet cables, which has my cable modem connected to it as well. With the server tower, do i just plug that into the router also via an ethernet cable? or is that not how it works? I'm going to be popping 4 hard drives into this server and basically want it to hold information for all 3 computers to access and run applications from etc, nothing more, nothing less. So what steps do i need to take? From having 4 completely formatted hard drives.
FreeNAS is probably the easiest starter for you. Good documentation and a pretty painless install... and best of all IT'S FREE http://www.freenas.org/ As for the hardware.. who knows.. What is in the box.. you could have something stock or you could have a solaris box... It's a server.. it could even be a vax XD
Well i'm getting some hdd's from scratch to put inside because the original hard drives had to be removed because they contained sensitive information. so do i need to install Microsoft Server 2003 on there?, because i dont fancy coping with any further learning curves right now. Is it as simple as formatting and re-setting up your pc, load server 2003 operating system from boot on a formatted hard drive, and install?
I have not install Win. server 03 OS for years, but as far as I remember the installation part of it is pretty similar to regular (XP) Win. OS install. You may want to think about domain and add your 3 computer to that domain… There you may want to look at Active Directory to set up the rest. As far as I remember it was pretty user friendly. On the side note… if I remember correctly with 03 Windows changed their default policies to ‘lock everything down by default and admin can unlock it if they need to’
