Samba Install

[libertyhawk]

I've got an old IBM T40 that I'm looking to use as a small file server for my home network using external USB drives.  The T40 is an older system and I currently have it running on Hardy Heron, but would like to run it on a smaller distro. 

How hard is it to install Samba on this distro?

Will I get a better performance out of the machine than what I'm currently getting?

[Please no comments about the cons of running a file server off a slow machine.  It works.  The network only has 12 users at a time and those users can stream their movies using VLC off the external USB drives pretty well.  I will likely upgrade to a box with a faster ethernet card in 6 months or so, but for now I need to get this solution working].

[hiro]

If it works, why do you want to change it?
Better start with tinycore when you got your new machine.

[libertyhawk]

Hardy as a desktop runs slow and I want to try to increase performance on the machine.

[Juanito]

It shouldn't be too big a deal to get samba set up and working - there are several threads on the subject in the forums.

[hiro]

It's less work to setup tinycore with samba than trying to trim down hardy, but don't expect better performance unless you know your bottlenecks.

[Rich]

Hi libertyhawk
This is very easy to try without changing your laptop. Burn a Tinycore disc, install Samba to a USB
thumb drive, and copy your samba.conf file to /usr/local/etc/samba/. I'm currently running Samba on
hardware that is far less capable than yours using that setup. I'm not streaming video but have no
problem achieving 4Mb/sec transfer speeds on a 100mb/sec network. See here for more numbers:
http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,12276.msg66046.html#msg66046
As you can see, top shows there is 9.0% idle time, though it does go to zero at times. The machine
is currently processor bound, not I/O bound. How do I know this? I measured it. First I measured
raw network speed using nc to copy from /dev/zero on the server to /dev/null on a much faster
machine and vice versa. I got about 90mb/sec. I repeated the test to include disc I/O by copying
from the servers drive to the fast machines /dev/null, and the fast machines /dev/zero to the
servers drive. I got about 75mb/sec. In case you don't know, nc is netcat.