Help Children by Helping me

[darkknight]

Hello, I'm new here and I have little to no knowledge of setting up servers. I'm part of a charity that is building a library in a developing country. Unfortunately, the area has no internet connection.

We plan on using a hard drive full of downloaded books and resources(it's all legal and donated). Someone told me I could use the hard drive as a proxy server, but I'm not sure how that would work.

The library is expected to have approximately 30 netbooks with an XP OS and one more powerful computer run by a librarian that we'll train. If anyone could point me to resources explaining how to set up a central server connecting all the computers and the hardrive, and the materials needed to do so I would be grateful. I've been looking online, but have been unsuccessful.

Any help is appreciated. Thank you.

 

[EGS]

Hm..so you're asking to set up a LAN between multiple computers to connect to a single computer (server) eh?

This server should have relatively good specs and a lot of storage space.

 

[/\E]

Hm..so you're asking to set up a LAN between multiple computers to connect to a single computer (server) eh?

This server should have relatively good specs and a lot of storage space.

For storing eBooks to access by a limited number of machines?

Anyway, darkknight, you will need a router to connect these machines. Since you will just be serving .pdf or .chm files(for download) you need no huge server, you could get a small desktop machine or a hard drive that is able to be networked via RJ-45 port.

Odds are that you will use wireless, right? If so, a wireless router, a simple wireless router for around $50-60 from Walmart will work fine and speedy.

My suggestion for configuring the netbooks, get one of them and configure it the way you want, use Clonezilla to make an image of the hard drive, and then you can install that image on the other netbooks so you don't have to sit and configure 30 machines. Just make sure you change each machine's name after installing the image.

Suggested items:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833124010
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822165128