Okay, recently my younger brother killed by dads PC by playing games which pushed dad to buy a new PC (which was made by a friend, ironically I was telling him that I could build it but he said that his friend has more experience and shit) FIANLLY! He had that PC for like 6-7 years? I will post the new specs on a new thread later. Anyways, I want to make a home server using the remains of my dad's PC, it's just missing a hard drive (which was used in the new PC) and a graphics card (which I will either use from an old motherboard box in the garage where it contained a Voodoo Graphics Card - Voodoo3-2000 (it's probably made in the late 1990s or really early 2000) and combine my pc with it by switching the CPU and/or motherboard, adding RAM and the hard drive from the PC that I am using now. My question is, how can I set up a home server (for file sharing as in it is saved onto the servers hard drive which can be accessed and used such as movies, now I can watch movies in my room without watching it on my dads PC. The server would probably a FTP server) using a free, easy to use software that will take care of a lot of the nessesities of a home server. This beats buying a home server from Best Buy which featured an Acer Server (EWWWW)
you might not be able to use parts from other computers, it depends on the relative ages and technologies You need a server operating system, such as windows server or a linux distribution using samba.
-Efficient file server -Easy Pick one. My home server box which I test on is using Ubuntu 9.10 with a Samba share. A friend of mine uses Microsoft Server 2003 on his. You can do SOME sharing using the regular Windows sharing but it requires some configuration and isn't efficient for dedicated filesharing. As for the old PC, as loony said some parts may not be compatible due to changes in technology in the last few years (which include RAM changes, CPU socket changes, the rise of SATA over IDE and the phasing out of AGP slots for graphics controllers). By all means, see what you can do, but you might well be better off buying an old second-hand, fully functional box and working from there instead of spending money making this one work.
main flaw with normal windows sharing is it limits the number of users that can be connected at once.
The parts are roughtly the same, it's just that my dads old PC is a bit newer than mine (it has more ram, larger hhd which is now in the new PC) It was made in 2002 with the SD-DDR years. BTW, this is a home server, not a Internet server where other users will use it like with torrents or whatever the hell it maybe. It's probably not going to be on the Internet either.
Depending on the age, and what your used to, you can go for just about any type of Linux, or windows server 2003/2008 depending on the power of the computer.
Re: How to build a home server? (sorry, broke title) No, filezilla alone is not enough. You will need something like Windows Server or an other OS which features server support. Probably they have apache or something installed. Install PHP and MySQL by yourself, if it isn't done by default (just an installation EXE). I have been using my old computer for file sharing (like downloads) and I've been using Windows Server 2003. Not too many expirience with it though.
filezilla is an ftp program, not a server operating system. apache is a web server, it is not required. Neither is PHP or MySQL. None of them come with windows server.
I thought Apache was needed...ah well. Dad configured the server though, so he installed apache, PHP and MySQL...I did the configuration.
