Just Another Tech Blog

They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and this ties in greatly with productivity. Windows has always done everything I've needed it to do, and moving OS offered little or no benefit to my productivity. It was just a lot of hassle and a steep learning curve.

However, around 18 months ago, I built a file server for my LAN, using a VIA Epia 800MHz motherboard and a couple of 200GB hard drives. With Windows installed, it was so slow that I had 10 or 20 second delays when trying to access the share across the network. The overhead of Windows was just too great for it to work effectively – odd for such a minor task. Finally I had the necessity and I decided to give Fedora Core 4 a go. Fedora is the free version of Red Hat, and is actually used on many web servers (including this one). It's use on web servers was a key reason to choosing this, as I wanted an environment that was similar to the Red Hat box I was used to, while also learning skills that could be transposed directly over to web server administration. Interestingly, a Fedora is the type of hat shown in the Red Hat logo (something a girlfriend of mine had to point out to me), so it is in fact a little play on words.

Installing Core 4 was painless and before I knew it, I had set up a fully secure file server that was almost instant to access. It was amazing how much difference in performance there was. When mapped as a network drive, it felt like it was a drive in my computer.