Don’t be scared by the title. I know how scary the word ubuntu is, but I’m here to tell you that ubuntu is fun. A few weeks ago I ventured into the world of Linux servers and installed ubuntu onto our fileserver. Up until now I’ve stuck with windows and mac osx server, but for the price of free I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to save $500 on our new server. Being a long time mac lover I’ve had a lot of experience using the unix subsystem which I knew would come in handy when setting up ubuntu, but to my surprise the install went without needing to input any commands. Now for those techy people out there I know its a security risk to install ubuntu with the UI elements, though for a fileserver it’s less a risk. When the ubuntu symbol came up and glowed, I knew I was going to have some fun. The UI was magnificent and is quite user friendly. Firefox comes installed and getting the system driver was easy. I just waited till it told me that it found new hardware and wanted to install the driver.  There is a great software repository that pr- installed that gives access to most software needed to get started. Also with a few clicks and an installation of the software Wine, many windows programs and games just work. Overall it was a great experience.

Now if you want to make a raid fileserver out of the fresh install of ubuntu then you do need to get friendly with terminal, but ubuntu has a great community to help out with the complicated stuff. Within 4 hours I had set up a raid 5 sharing via SMB over a bonded NIC (getting around 1.5gbps when accessed form two windows computers).

Cheers,

~Julius out