#1 2016-05-24 21:39:19

Rocky

Member

From: Ireland

Registered: 2016-02-03

Posts: 25

BunsenLabs as a fileserver base

Hi all,

I am thinking of pressing a soon to be replaced VistaBusiness PC into use as a file server in a small business by wiping Windows and replacing it with BL and SAMBA. My thinking is that BL is relatively light and is a step above a pure non-GUI install . Thoughts ? Maybe I would be better doing a Debian netinstall and stopping short of adding a desktop ?

Any suggestions for backing up such a file server ?

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"The long way out is the short way home"

geekosupremo

Member

Registered: 2016-04-27

Posts: 169

Re: BunsenLabs as a fileserver base

Seems to me the question is one of administration. If you aren't the only one that will need to administer the server, having some sort of GUI is helpful, especially if the other users aren't all the same level of technical skill.

Other than that BL or Deb netinstall should do you fine. Since BL is still Debian Jessie at the core, with some nice finishing and polish on top.

I've done a little SAMBA and it's not the worst although the config is not my favorite. It's a little difficult to know what options you really need, or I need more time in the docs ... either way it's manageable.

As to backup ... there I'm still sorting things out myself. Although most people would probably suggest some sort of rsync script in a crontab.

Rocky

Member

From: Ireland

Registered: 2016-02-03

Posts: 25

Re: BunsenLabs as a fileserver base

Thanks guys for the detailed responses - sorry for the delay in responding to your suggestions. Plenty of reading ahead for me then .

@madoromi - hadn't crossed my mind to look into NFS . From some brief digging seems it might be a little faster but can only restrict access by ip rather than user which might be ok for my requirements. Thanks

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"The long way out is the short way home"

nobody

The Great

Registered: 2015-08-10

Posts: 3,655

Re: BunsenLabs as a fileserver base

Thanks guys for the detailed responses - sorry for the delay in responding to your suggestions. Plenty of reading ahead for me then .

@madoromi - hadn't crossed my mind to look into NFS . From some brief digging seems it might be a little faster but can only restrict access by ip rather than user which might be ok for my requirements. Thanks

NFSv4 supports fine-grained permission management using UNIX users/groups as well as ACLs. If you want to share user accounts/ACLs between Windows and Linux in order to map a Windows user to the correct uid/gid on the Linux  file server you might want to look into setting up LDAP: If you guys manage Windows accounts centrally, it's straightforward to export the account database via LDAP and authorize against that database on Linux by using the PAM LDAP module (see e.g. this resource).