So my small file server at my house had been running XP for the last 5 years. Simply put, it sets in a closet with no keyboard, mouse, monitor, and it was more hassle to have to carry it somewhere I could reinstall it then it was worth to me. It never got pushed, it just shared files, got logged into to run updates and then rebooted once a week. That's it, for 5 years.

However, this weekend Windows finally up and croaked. No hardware issues, just Windows being...well, Windows. So it's now running Debian Squeeze with ssh setup and Samba (a lot of people I know use windows and come over to get files from me). Set up the files shares in Samba identical to the old Windows server, so any of my friends who had this set up to access won't even see the difference.

First time ever setting up SSH or Samba. I really like tunneling X over SSH, that is awesome IMO. I set up PuTTY and Xminimerg or whatever it's called so I can even tunnel X onto a windows machine. Mostly just to take screenshots of things like dolphin on a Windows screen.

I'm not sure if there is a question here but let me put in my vote for FreeNAS as the best File Server on the face of the planet (perhaps not the best; but certainly the best free option). You might want to give it a shot (the web management feature is priceless!) I have used some variation of the FreeNAS system since the beginning. Unfortauntely, I recently had a catastrophe that required me moving my arrays to a Windows 2008 server and I can't describe how much I hate using Windows as a file server, especially in a mixed environment with Windows and Linux clients (some on a domain and others not on a domain).

No questions in there, no. Unless FreeNAS uses apt, pacman, or zypper as it's package manager, I won't bother looking at it. In years of using various linux/bsd distros, those are the only package managers I have found I can tolerate. And I'm FAR too uncaring about it to touch anything for even a millisecond that doesn't use a package manager and expects me to update everything manually.

Nope, just a suggestion. I personally wouldn't ever run a NAS with a package manager but that's just me.

I won't run anything on a x86 machine that doesn't have a package manager. If I bought a standalone NAS enclosure, sure, but not an X86 box that happens to act as a file server.

Different strokes for different folks.

I prefer to stack up an old x86 450MHZ PC with a RAID card and 4x 2TB disks running a NAS.

Yup. No interest in running a strict NAS here unless it's a standalone NAS enclosure. If it's a full x86 compliant pc, I may decide to do more than NAS (even though I never have), so it's got to be a full server.