Which Distribution for old PC to use as File Server 1999

I've done such myself just now on Debian.

My experience was similar to yours. More SCO and SUNOS though possibly

It has been entirely successful, and I am happy to help another person do the same.

The best thing about Debian that suited my purpose was the modularity of installation. I don't seem to have much more than I need to do the job, although I have to say there area lot of daemons whose purpose I have yet to totally identify, around the process list ;-)

You will find that the information you want is hard to find, often not actually correct, and never presented in te form that you want it.

I.e. reading through 27 pages on man files to answer the question 'how do I get my PC's to see the file server properly' does contain the answer, but not in that form..

But twas ever thus. I remember spending an hour in the local bookshop before I bought a book, essentially in order to be able to read a 4 line entry that gave the exact two lines needed to correctly install a printer on a system V Unix...and a phone call to Cisco USA from the UK, to work out why their ISDN router didn't..eventually the gy I spoke to said 'you need to put type=love in the entry.."Are you sure?" "Oh yes I spent 3 months in Europe and the UK testing that bit of code after I wrote it"

The better the coder, usually the worse at writing it up they are. Its also the same in database designs. There is one good relational way to write a database. Unfortunately that means that for any specific view on the data, you have to cull data from half a dozen plus tables, select the items relevant to the query, and present them to the user in a way that suits their PURPOSE, not the way that reflects the database design. Very few designers of entry forms actually do that..

I spent over ten years in technical support, and the number of short articles I wrote telling people how to achieve a certain result, rather than what the stuff actually did, were numerous.

Its fantastically odd that the mircosoft approach to all this was to hide the complexity and produce a 'one size fits all' solution that essentially second guesses what the user wants, and loads everything they might ever need, whilst the Linux models buttumes you pretty much know what you want and how it works, and provides you with enormous details about the most obscure things you might need to do, but seldom a simple clear explanation of 'here is a configuration files suitable for case 'X' and this is what the various bits mean'.

From experience in other places, what would be nice is a place - web forum - where configurations that worked for given situations could be posted by those who got them to work, with simple explanations of what they did and why they were needed.

Anyway, the recommendation I have based on my limited experience, is go Debian, install just the base package, and then samba and CUPS and, if you want an intranet server maybe apache and SQUID, and if you want to manage remotely telnet (insecure, need to be in a firewalled place) or sshd. You will need some simple mail capability - I decided not to re-enter sendmail territory, although I am probably one of the few people who has totally rewritten a sendmail.cf from a blank piece of paper..POSTFIX is good enough to get error messages off the unit and onto your PC..I added NETATALK support for my wifes MACOS9 machine..and a lot of stuff I haven't yet entirely sorted to burn DVD's for backup. GROWIFSOS is the place to start for that.

The quality of the code today is first rate. Compared even with a front line unix like SCO was once.

The quality of the available documentation is execrable. I am thinking that I could make a living for the next ten years writing it. The ignorant and stupid are catered for by plug and play installations, the intelligent and knowledgeable can get there from man pages and hints, but the intelligent but ignorant are simply left between two stools.

Plus this newsgroup is riddled with people whose response to 'how to I get to there?' is usually 'don't start from here'

Two people have stood out from the crowd - aragorn and dances with crows. If you are lucky enough to catch their eyes, you will find that if they understand the question, they will generally send you a terse, but uniquely helpful response. One suspects they are busy managing piles of boxes somewhere, on very large salaries and haven't the time to do much else. :-)

The rest vary from 'I did it this way, it worked for me' which is great if thats they way you want to do it as well, to the downright sadistic 'tell me everything about your installation down to the last revision number in your kernel or I wont deign to consider your question, newbie, and, if you don't know what a minor revision number is, how do you expect to install anything other than windows XP?'

Google, time, and patience, are your friends as well.

I will do my best to buttist.