Goals of Setting Up a File Server

By centralizing data and applications on a file server, you can accomplish several goals:

• Centralized distribution — You can add documents or applications to one location and make them accessible to any authorized computer or user. In this way, you don’t have to be responsible for placing necessary files on every computer.

• Transparency — Using protocols such as NFS, clients of your file server (Windows, Linux, or UNIX systems) can connect your file systems to their local file systems as if your file systems existed locally. (In other words, no drive letters. Just change to the remote system’s mount point and you are there.)