Ubuntu Server Setup

[peekaboo]

I'd like to use an old Pentium 2 (500 MHz), 512 MB of ram, computer as a home server and I need some hand holding.

I have one old 120 Gb IDE hard drive and another 250 Gb 4 year old IDE hard drive that I'd like to use in it.

1. Do I need to have both hard drives installed when I install the server OS?

2. Do I need (should I) to use LVM?

3. Should I partition the hard drives? What is a suggested structure?

I'd like to be able to do the following:

A. Create several directories (movies, pictures, software, documents, backups...)

B. Have some directories accessible to everyone and some accessible to me only

C. Have the server automatically backup directories on the network (once a week copy any new files I've added to my pictures directory on my main computer, once a month/week backup documents from my wife's computer...)

D. Be able to save files downloaded with my main computer directly to the server and/or have my torrent client run on the server so I can leave the server running and sharing torrents while my main computer is turned off.

I've searched online and there are many "guides" but none have been adequate (or I'm too dumb).
Can someone guide me on how to set up my system?

Thanks

[Force Flow]

I can only answer part of you question...when you install Ubuntu, it automatically does the partitioning.

But, if you want to seperate the OS from the data, The /home directory would need to be partitioned off manually during the installation (if I recall correctly)

[shadowpr]

What i did, was have a separate drive for all my personal info. You can partition your primary drive as well and then add he second drive if you like.

As for backing up, I just finished going through this, and it depends on what operating systems you're dealing with. I love rsync for linux. I like it for windows. They take some time to get used to.

As for sharing certain folders with only certain users, that's how I had mine setup. You need to install samba, and manually edit the smb file. It took some work to get the user part right though.

[Tin]

Ubuntu Server will run great on that system. If you need a GUI, I suggest installing the XFCE desktop environment, as its very lightweight and will run great on that setup. For torrents, you will want to install the LAMP stack and Torrentflux. Torrentflux is great because you can access it from anywhere and download torrents directly to your server. It even comes with a number of torrent search engines, and allows you to add many more. If youre serving Windows clients, youll need the Samba package, and for Unix based computers, youll need to install NFS server. While Linux can access Samba no problem, NFS is far snappier and efficient.