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Data Server With a Laptop and an Old Router

Go to solution Solved by Admiral Koba,

Yes, this is entirely possible. I would personally recommend using Windows to share the drives out as it is likely more familiar for you to use and does not have a steep learning curve (and is easier to manage for permissions - in my personal opinion). You can use home/pro versions of windows to achieve this (right click the folder, sharing, share it) and this will work fine.

 

Alternatively, a NAS distro (https://distrowatch.com/search.php?category=NAS) would work well in this case - however I feel this may be a little too much to get started with and may be more appropriate to use in a lab environment.

 

Best of luck with your project.

Hello everyone

 

I have a lenovo T420 laptop with two HDDs on it, basically i want to make a data server, i have two other computers that i want to have access on them to the main laptop,

 

what I'm thinking is having a the T420 as a server connected to a router and then an output of data from the router to the other two computers (using lan cables).

 

any ideas on how to achieve that?

 

thanks!

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When you say data server do you mean file server? If so yes it's very doable. You might find it interesting to know that a router isn't even entirely necessary if you only plan to use this over the LAN.

 

It's possible to file share over the network with Windows but if you'd like to play with Linux you could use free distros like FreeNAS, NAS4Free, Rockstor, CentOS, Ubuntu Server, there's a bunch of others. Paid versions may include Redhat & UnRAID and again many others.

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Yes, this is entirely possible. I would personally recommend using Windows to share the drives out as it is likely more familiar for you to use and does not have a steep learning curve (and is easier to manage for permissions - in my personal opinion). You can use home/pro versions of windows to achieve this (right click the folder, sharing, share it) and this will work fine.

 

Alternatively, a NAS distro (https://distrowatch.com/search.php?category=NAS) would work well in this case - however I feel this may be a little too much to get started with and may be more appropriate to use in a lab environment.

 

Best of luck with your project.

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3 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

When you say data server do you mean file server? If so yes it's very doable. You might find it interesting to know that a router isn't even entirely necessary if you only plan to use this over the LAN.

 

It's possible to file share over the network with Windows but if you'd like to play with Linux you could use free distros like FreeNAS, NAS4Free, Rockstor, CentOS, Ubuntu Server, there's a bunch of others. Paid versions may include Redhat & UnRAID and again many others.

yes, a file server, i want all my files away from the actual work machine,

 

i thought of the router cause i want to share the files over lan for more than a laptop

 

thanks a lot

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39 minutes ago, Admiral Koba said:

Yes, this is entirely possible. I would personally recommend using Windows to share the drives out as it is likely more familiar for you to use and does not have a steep learning curve (and is easier to manage for permissions - in my personal opinion). You can use home/pro versions of windows to achieve this (right click the folder, sharing, share it) and this will work fine.

 

Alternatively, a NAS distro (https://distrowatch.com/search.php?category=NAS) would work well in this case - however I feel this may be a little too much to get started with and may be more appropriate to use in a lab environment.

 

Best of luck with your project.

i thought of using Ubuntu Linux first, but thinking about it twice, I'm definitely going for windows now because of what you've mentioned,

 

thank you! 

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