Hi Our Head of IT (who has final say) wants to spend a LARGE sum of money (not including ANY software) buying a 'R'eady 'M'ade Multimedia server which would take some of the load off our other 'R'eady 'M'ade server. I need a Linux powered alternative which would prove too attractive financially (She already knows some of the other advantages) to ignore. This is how things work at present. All (approx 100) stations have a copy of virtual cd on them. Virtual CDs drives are added to a station and images are then made of CD titles which can be inserted ejected through a command/graphical frontend. These images (in a proprietary format, not iso) are kept on the server, their size reflects the amount of data on the cd they came from. The stations access the images through a single share. So, What kind of hardware would I need? I have some general idea, eg scsi, as much mem as poss etc Would samba be able to handle sharing these large image files to multiple users? Would the server be able to handle been used as something else? eg a CUPS print server, handling obese M$ office files. Are there any disadvantages? eg how easy is it to get the stations to remap the image share? Has anybody already tried this? As always, thanks in advance for any advice I have until the 15th January to dissuade and persuade. Mike Rees Ysgol Glanymor School