SuSe (Soo-Zah) on a DELL: The GigaServer

A new Dell Inspiron 531S is only $319. Add two 500Gb drives and a gigabit Network card for about $280 more and you have built a machine with 1 Terabyte of storage!

HOW TO BUILD AN AWESOME SERVER:
When your new Inspiron 531s arrives, remove the 160Gb drive with MS Vista OS. Set it aside if you ever want to revert back to Vista, otherwise keep it in the machine and repartition and format the 160Gb drive for SuSe Linux.

SuSe Linux is a free operating system with a nice desktop. It can be downloaded and burned to a DVD for installation. Novell owns SuSe, but it is still free. Installation is easy, just boot from the DVD drive with the SuSe install disk and follow the prompts through the installation.
Using SMB, the SuSe server can share it's dual 500Gb drive as windows based shared drives on a windows network. You can build a web page on the SuSe server, FTP files, telnet to the command line, etc.

If you want a simple file sharing server on your LAN, save your Windows 2003 Server licence cost and use SuSe. It is rock solid and easy to configure. The 1Gb Network Card means getting big files to/from your server is fast - taking about 1 minute per GByte.

You could do an incremental backup from a laptop to the server in less than a minute.
Your laptop could use a Gb/USB adapter costing $35, in fact you may need a new Gb LAN switch which costs less than $100. A tip: Gb speed requires that all eight wires of your cat5 cabling, most cables are already wired this way, but if you have problems check your cables.

If you work with large files such as video, this is a lot of server for $680.