So, you’ve got a well used computer, and you also don’t follow simple proven steps by using it. Sure, it can’t play new game titles, maybe can’t run technology software, don’t fret, it’s not totally worthless. Converting your old computer straight into a home data server opens a selection of possibilities, and a range of new things you can do with your computer(s) as well as the network.
So, how would you do it? Well, if it’s already build for Windows Networking, you’ve got the fundamentals setup to get a Windows file server, and may simply employ where you live network for transfering/working with files, however, this information is gonig showing you the more effective, and more powerful way: setting up a Linux file server.
The first step is to pick a Linux distro, DistroWatch.com lists the most popular distributions, and reviews an array of distributions, we’re planning to utilize Ubuntu [5.10] operating-system, using a server installation, mainly because it’s the os this author uses for his desktop, and is quickly becoming typically the most popular distribution around.
Your old computer likely has enough memory, along with a powerful enough CPU to own Ubuntu, however, if you are planning to work with this server as being a major central file server, it’s going to likely have to have a new hard-drive. You can deal with that all on your own.
Whenever you insert the Ubuntu CD, and boot into it, rather than pressing [enter] at the boot screen, type ’server’ then press enter - this can prevent it from installing some of the *-desktop packages, rather than setting up any unneeded applications. Another option is remote file server.
After following a steps of installation, you will be prompted having a logon screen - enter the password you provided during installation, and you’re as part of your fresh Linux system. From here, you can do many methods from investigate web, to create laptop for several networking tasks, to learn a selection of Linux-based games.
Package management is often a critical portion of managing a Linux system, luckily Ubuntu is sold with two distinct and useful tools to help within your package managing. Aptitude [which, is definitely simply a UI for apt-get] and apt-get.
A package called “samba” will help you build proper networking between Linux and Windows computers (no less than, we hope you’ve got your networking issues sorted out). Running “sudo apt-get install samba” inside your new command line will state the apt-get application to put in the samba package, and set it up with default settings.
Once samba is installed, you’ll want to set it up to share certain files/directories, and place them on the network - samba networking is often a massive topic of it’s own, and way beyond the scope of this article, however, running “man samba” will give you the samba manual file, which lists off a series of other manuals to look at. Google’s always helpful too. 
Now, once you’ve networking and samba setup, you are able to transfer files between Windows and Linux through Network Neighborhood/smbclient - you’ve now got a simple data server setup. Yet another easy meal, wasn’t it?
In case you wish to go further, Pure-FTPd will assist you to build a completely featured FTP (file transfer protocol) server about this box, which you can use to access your files remotely from any computer set up through an FTP client (Windows Explorer has one built-in!), creating an Apache based web-server is fairly simple with Ubuntu’s apt-get packages, and OpenSSH allows the user to remotely log into your Linux shell from any computer equipped with an SSH client.
A slight advancement for this system could allow you to set up Bash scripts combined with cron would permit you to set up scripts which immediately backup files every X days, or scripts to perform certain processing to files at certain times - the number of choices are effectively endless.
