Turn my PC into a file server.

OK, I have a PC with three 250GB drives I want to use as a server for my Mac on the same network.

1) Can I use one of the PCs drives as a Time Machine drive?

2) Can I store my videos on it and access them from the Mac without a huge delay? (Wireless network at 802.11G)


Thanks!

EDIT: The PC would be running Ubuntu 8.04, but I could settle for XP if needed.
EDIT 2: Screw Ubuntu, it would be WinXP SP2.

i have one and it only runs as a file server. no other tasking. the xp stays up for months at a time with these conditions. it is headless and i vnc into the box from time to time form my mac to give it a reset and do house cleaning. a good way to re cycle an old xp pc. i bought a hi point pci raid card and run 8 500g drives as 4 raid1 pairs.

1) Can I use one of the PCs drives as a Time Machine drive?
yes. you dont have to dedicate a whole drive to the process its just a tar file of some type. it will grow fast in size tho. time machine (tm) has a software bug in that it can not create a initial disk image on a windows network file system. because of this apple has disable its ability to list resources on microsoft networks that would not initially work. there is a script you can type in a mac terminal scession to fix this. other than that it seems to work well. keep in mind your work leads to an unsupported situation but seems to work fine. do a search this forum for my (and other peeps) details on ** to do this. i think i worked on it like this year march. i also posted in the computer section of s2ki.com forum.

2) Can I store my videos on it and access them from the Mac without a huge delay? (Wireless network at 802.11G)
yes, it works well. osx10.4.10 sorta worked and 10.4.11 worked well enough. the 10.5.2/3 is easy to use. expect no delay but 802.11g is somewhat maxed out with video in real life situations so it may be unstable on some days.

ubuntu would be better but more work. xp is functional. best to not put too much effort here as everything is going to nas box type situations and 250g drives are old but still have life.

I plan on doing this at some point in time. Although, I'm going to try to take it a step further and make it a web server so that I can keep it at my parent's house so I can access my files anywhere.

This will be somewhat of a challenge for me, I would like to use Ubuntu, but I have a feeling I'm not near comfortable with the Terminal and everything to do it. Plus, my parents don't have a static IP address, so this may become a problem.

Don't rule out Windows Home Server for the OS. It has some pretty good features and is very very easy to set up and use.

Moved.

This is what I want to do:

Windows XP SP2 computer:

Drive M:/ - For the Time Machine backup of my MacBook when it is connected to my home WiFi

Drive N:/ - For my "legally" downloaded videos, can I store them on the PC, but play them on my MacBook without copying them to the HDD?

Thanks

your post got moved so i dont know where to do this, maybe your will see this:

i use Office Web Sharing by kerriasoft to share files, easy fast and low cost