SME office server operating system suggestions?

Question

I need to setup a new small office file server to hold all of our documents. I do not want to pay for Windows 2003 again as I did with my larger business server so what open source (free) server software with a graphical user interface should I be looking at.

It will be used to simply hold files and serve them as and when they are needed. Files permissions would be useful but I do not need to go the whole way and setup a domain based login system.

I have 2 drives which are set with RAID 1 and then this would need to be backed up off site every night, week and month so some software would be needed to do this.

Let me know your thoughts.

Regards,

Matt

Answer 1

Definitely FreeNAS: http://www.freenas.org/index.php?option=...

It's precisely what you want, and free (except for the computer, drives, etc.)

Answer 2

If you want it free, the only real choice is Linux.

And if you want it Microsoft endorsed the only distro choice is openSuse LINUX.

Answer 3

Definitely go for a Linux server, probably Debian. It is UNIX-like, so it is very stable, and will work on almost all server hardware. It is completely  free and open source, and Debian is the most commonly used free license version of Linux on servers. It should handle everything you talked about just fine, and shouldn't be too hard to set up. The graphical interface, X11, is very flexible and can at the very least do what you want. You will have to learn how the system works, because it is obviously different than Windows, but that should not be too hard.