G4 400mhx into a server

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krbmedia

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I would like to use my G4 400mhz machine as a file server for predominately Windows machines. I will be adding a second drive.

What setup do you recommend for the best network?

Should the data drive be formatted in FAT32 or use Samba? Which will be faster? What's the advantage of each?
 
krbmedia said:
I would like to use my G4 400mhz machine as a file server for predominately Windows machines. I will be adding a second drive.

What setup do you recommend for the best network?

Should the data drive be formatted in FAT32 or use Samba? Which will be faster? What's the advantage of each?
Click to expand...

You will have to use Samba running on either MacOSX or Linux.

Samba is not a disk format; it is an open-source implementation of Windows File Sharing. Most Linux installs include Samba, though you'd need to download a version of Linux for the PowerPC processor. Mac OS X included Samba from 10.2 onwards. I'd go with Mac OS 10.4 for convenience if you have it already, it will be the least likely to have driver/compatibility issues.

Whichever you choose, format the drives with the default format (HFS+ if you're using MacOSX) because using other formats will only slow things down.
 
By the by, if you do decide to go with a Linux distribution to use as a server, I recommend any of the Ubuntu flavors, probably the server version. Just make sure you download the Alternate Installation CD and not the Live CD. The Alternate installation CD doesn't give you the pretty GUI installation but it does give you more options during the installation than the Live CD at the moment.
 
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