what is the best way to transfer games from a linux server to a lan of windowsXP

Question

samba service on linux and.. copy folder? keep games as .rar at samba and extract them on the fly?

rsync daemon at the server?

ftp them from the server?

anyone has any benchmarks or previous experience.

Answer 1

Samba is probably the best option. If you have the ISO's you can just mount on the fly and install the game. I brought my linux box to a lan once and had 4 people mount an ISO's from it and installed games no problem.

Answer 2

Samba can be quite slow when serving files as 'read-only' from a Linux system to Windows clients. By all means use Samba if you require write access from the Windows systems, but if you're primarily downloading the content, I'd go with something else, preferably:

• FTP server, probably the fastest, and there's heaps of FTP clients out there. You get easy-to-implement write access too.
• HTTP server, everyone has a browser, of course :).

I wouldn't use rsync because it often uses SSH by default, which adds overhead in terms of encrypting everything. On an internal LAN, I'd be less concerned about encryption, especially if you're setting up a read-only anonymous repository (a la via FTP).

Answer 3

If you have hardware that is capable of "gigabit ethernet" FTP is probably better choice. I have had problems using samba with windows, so i think using multiple systems with samba will give you a headache.