Win95/98 as Broadband Server?

      • A couple of days ago I had a cable connection put in. I want to make a fairly large amount of my own music files (50+ megs) available online for short periods. No upload site is very attractive. I don’t have a problem paying the bandwidth charges, but I don’t want to pay for ISP disk space when I’ve got lots of my own.
  • I have two PC’s I am free to abuse: an ancient 586/120Mhz and a PII 350Mhz/320 Megs RAM that I can use as dedicated machines. My main goal here is to “easily set up a file server”, not “learn about Linux”… I have a retail Mandrake 7.2 CD somewhere or I can install Win95 or Win98SE. -I understand some of the possible consequences of a rooted server and don’t want to have to buy any additional software to do this.
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  • Quickly, how easily can this be done with each OS above, and is 95 or 98SE that much worse of a choice that Linux? - DougC

It really only takes a pretty basic machine to act as a server for 1 or 2 connections at a time. Even a 486 will do. A 3MBPS connection will be your main bottleneck.

But Win9x is so bad security-wise it is really best to use a Unix box with an NT-class OS the next choice.

Having said that, broadband companies forbid running your own servers and will block common ports (21, 80). And they also will block a nonstandard port once they find it. It takes some ingenuity to get around it. (And saying how is probably not suitable for this board.) I.e., you are probably not going to be able to do it.