home server setups?

[hawken king]

I was thinking about the right hardware for a home server the other day. I make websites and I'm fed up of moving stuff around from my laptop and mini.

What are the essential components? How does it work?

my home setup is as follows:

mac mini (2gb ram, 1.8ghz)
dvi to hdmi cable
sony bravia
usb2 500gb drive
2 x firewire drives (250gb each)
Powerbook 12” 1.25gb ram 1.5ghz
Airport express
Bluetooth mouse/keyboard

So the bravia is the head for my mac mini, and use the usb drive to store all my important design work, reference files etc. The firewire drives are currently stuffed with videos and linked to frontrow.

So for this to work I’m guessing that I need to somehow make a network drive. Because I’m unable to see the external drives from the laptop when connecting to the mini.

Is it possible to see the external drives over the network? Or will I have to buy an airport extreme?

I was also thinking about raiding the two firewire drives to backup the ½ terra drive in a partition, with the remaining space partition to store movies. Is it worth it?

Also I'd like to connect to the home server remotely from my office to grab files etc, how does that work? is it possible?

 

[himansk]

I was thinking about the right hardware for a home server the other day. I make websites and I'm fed up of moving stuff around from my laptop and mini.

What are the essential components? How does it work?

my home setup is as follows:

mac mini (2gb ram, 1.8ghz)
dvi to hdmi cable
sony bravia
usb2 500gb drive
2 x firewire drives (250gb each)
Powerbook 12” 1.25gb ram 1.5ghz
Airport express
Bluetooth mouse/keyboard

So the bravia is the head for my mac mini, and use the usb drive to store all my important design work, reference files etc. The firewire drives are currently stuffed with videos and linked to frontrow.

So for this to work I’m guessing that I need to somehow make a network drive. Because I’m unable to see the external drives from the laptop when connecting to the mini.

Is it possible to see the external drives over the network? Or will I have to buy an airport extreme?

I was also thinking about raiding the two firewire drives to backup the ½ terra drive in a partition, with the remaining space partition to store movies. Is it worth it?

Also I'd like to connect to the home server remotely from my office to grab files etc, how does that work? is it possible?

You need to enable file sharing in your mini. If you have leopard installed on both systems then its much simpler, the mini will show up in your laptop without any configurations. I run leopard server on my mini which made my life so much easier.
To connect remotely, either you need ARD (apple remote desktop) or leopard's Back to my mac. ALso you will need to use port forwarding on your router to forward the ports used by the respective protocols to the mini.