Need help...Home NAS...

[Descent]

My father wants to set up a cheap NAS setup in our house.

I have an old K6-2 board that will do perfectly, the FIC VA-503+.

I just need to know how I go about connecting everything to our current network setup:

Dell TrueMobile 2400 802.11b/g Router

Motorola Surfboard cable modem

MaxPower, you seem like the networking guru here, how would I do this?

 

[MaxPower]

It sounds like you're looking to build a server out of an old board. That will work fine but what other components do you have. You’ll need at least some drives, memory, a case, a nic (wireless or wired), monitor, KB, mouse.
That's a lot of work for some simple NAS.
Another route that you can accomplish for around $200 is a network attached drive. For closer to $300 you can get wireless NAS.

If you have your heart set on using a computer as a server, you need to do a few things.
-Load Windows 2K or 2k3 on the server. (2k pro will do fine)
-All computers on the same subnet. (I.e. 192.168.1.xxx)
-All computers in the same workgroup (i.e. WORKGROUP MSHOME, etc.)
-Share out drives or directories on the server or use administrative shares on the client machines. (Map the drives to something like, \\servername\c$ )
-Make sure that all users have their username and password set up in an account on the server.
-If you trust everyone the easiest thing is to put all your household users in the administrator's group on the server. Then you can restrict access to personal folders by denying access to all but the owner.

 

[Descent]

I already have most of the parts, so we are set.

But, how would I do this in layman's terms?

 

[Jung]

If you're still wanting to learn Linux/BSD, Samba would be the way to go. You could run everything off of a very slim text-only install. If you decided to go that route, I'll help you through it, it is a bit more difficult though.

 

[tzedek]

whats a nas?

 

[Descent]

Network Attached Storage.