Home Network - seeking advice

[motomadman]

Hi All, looks like a great set of Forums here and lot's of GOOD advice. Here goes my first post:

 

I work from home programming (MSSQL etc), have a small network w/broadband router and it all works pretty well.

 

My main problem is file sharing / performance. Email is the biggest culprit. Personal folders pushing 400MB. I'd like to run email from any machine but accessing the personal folders over the network is slow.

 

I am thinking of upgrading to 1000MBit/Sec network and getting a dedicated server for email and SQL. Price point for used servers is awesome. Multi-processor RAID (Dell) servers can be had on ebay for

 

So, I have two related questions:

1. Performance. Using this setup, how much slower will the network/server access be versus a local (SCSI 10RPM) hard disk?

2. Email setup. I've never dealt with an Outlook Server. Would it be adviseable for this scenario?

 

Thanks!

 

-Marc.

[ecastillor]

I dont know....is this related in any way to the architecture visualization industry?...if not...I dont know if this is the right forum for your question....

 

good luck!

[Ernest Burden III]

Do I read your post correctly that you are looking at all that expense and hassle so you can read email on more than one machine in your house?

[motomadman]

Well, okay, it would be more than just email. SQL Server and probably media files as well. But email is the biggie, I'd like to run email from either of two machines without worrying about which one has the latest (personal folder) files, ...so a server seems like a good possibility. A One-time expense of $500 is not a big deal, especially if it improves performance and functionality. I'm just not sure about the performance though...

[Sawyer]

Why not route your e-mail into your GMail or yahoo account?

[abcgraphix]

Export your personal folders and everything else to a pst file, make a folder called e-mail profile or whatever you like, share this folder with full rights. Using outlook, point the data file on your account to the shared pst file.

This should work fine (you will have a central point where everything is getting saved to).

In order to have a e-mail server, you will need the server, a fixed ip and exchange server (this will cost you a pretty penny).

[The Drew]

Here is how we do it at work...

 

Outlook (NOT OUTLOOK EXPRESS mind you) uses .pst files for everything. We have ~50 users, and we have everyone's .pst files residing on the server. Here is how you do it. Open outlook, right click on Personal Folders (in the hierarchy, it holds inbox, outbox, sent items, etc.) and click properties. In the first tab, there should be a button entitled "advanced". Hit it and find where on the hard drive the .pst file is stored. Relocate that file to the server. Next time you open up Outlook, it'll ask where the .pst file is stored. Navigate to your server where you stored the .pst file, and from now on it will default to that .pst on the server.

 

On machine #2, find where outlook is storing that .pst file, and simply delete it. Then when Outlook opens next, it'll ask where the .pst file is. Navigate to that same folder. Now both are using that same .pst file.

 

I'm sure there will be some kinks found here and there, but your obviously rather suave when it comes to the computer anyway, so I'm sure you can figure it out. If you have any questions, we may can help, but remember, this forum is primarily for use as a Computer Graphics specializing in Architectural Design forum. This problem doesn't exactly pertain to this forum. But, we seem to be pretty nice people, so we can accomodate once in a while.

 

Hope that helps!