# Office server plus two clients (novice)



## UncommonStatsNerd (Feb 27, 2016)

Greetings forum members. This is my first post and I am putting it in "general" because I am genuinely unsure as to whether another sub-forum is appropriate. In this thread I am looking for advice and search terms to find existing resources on the internet.

I am interested in the possibility of setting up a powerful machine in my office (multicore CPU and lots of RAM) which can be remotely accessed from two "clients" simultaneously. By this I mean that two users can login to the "server" from two other computers on the network and freely access the same "server" filesystem and applications with a separate desktop environment for each user.

Example usage: person A logs into "server" machine from their laptop and can open, edit and save spreadsheets etc., whilst at the same time person B logs in from their desktop in another room and browses the internet. The server machine would be left on at all times with a network connection, but without peripherals and monitor connected.

The main advantages which I have in mind are the ability to use the ZFS system with two or more large HDDs and no longer needing to use pendrives etc.

So my questions are straightforward.

Is such a setup possible?

If so, what is it called (so that I can Google it)?

How feasible would it be with FreeBSD?

Can anyone point me in the direction of relevant resources?


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## ondra_knezour (Feb 27, 2016)

Remote desktop, VNC, X Window System is also network transparent so you can run remote applications on local desktop


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## wblock@ (Feb 27, 2016)

The simplest setup is just a file server.  The client systems see the file server as another "drive" with files available.  Samba and NFS are the two commonly-used network filesystems, but there are others.

The fileserver could also act as an internet gateway for those machines, although best practices suggests that the file server be inside the network and a separate firewall/router system is used for that.

Setting up the FreeBSD side of this is not too difficult, much is covered by the Handbook and web resources.  Configuring Samba can be challenging, but there are guides on that also.  With only two clients, the server does not require many resources.  For ZFS, having 8G or more of RAM is helpful.


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## UncommonStatsNerd (Feb 27, 2016)

wblock@ said:


> The simplest setup is just a file server.  The client systems see the file server as another "drive" with files available.  Samba and NFS are the two commonly-used network filesystems, but there are others.
> 
> The fileserver could also act as an internet gateway for those machines, although best practices suggests that the file server be inside the network and a separate firewall/router system is used for that.
> 
> Setting up the FreeBSD side of this is not too difficult, much is covered by the Handbook and web resources.  Configuring Samba can be challenging, but there are guides on that also.  With only two clients, the server does not require many resources.  For ZFS, having 8G or more of RAM is helpful.


I was overthinking this. A file server is a more sensible idea, but even that is overkill compared with a simple NAS setup.


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## balanga (Feb 27, 2016)

I'd suggest looking at FreeNAS  http://www.freenas.org/


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