File sharing Server questions

I'm looking into starting a file sharing server (think this is what its called) which will allow people to login into one of my PC's over the internet and download my files. My goal is to allow family members and friends to access my files and only specific files on this PC. The files could be family videos as well as pictures. Some video files will be in excess of 10gb along with typical jpegs and what not. I'll probably be running windows server 2008 on it. I'm also considering allowing people on some other forums that I'm a member on (cars, hobbies, ect) and allowing people to host vids on my server. My current IP provider is Comcast and I'm on a Dynamic IP so wondering how easy this is or if its recommended I get a static IP.

I'm totally new in this area and am looking for some articles that you'd recommend on this. I'd also like to have password protection / or login criteria so car members aren't able to view all my family videos, but can only log into some folder labeled (cars) and not my folder labeled family. Or another option would be that people have to login before they are able to even see what folders are accessible.


For instance car members could only see car folders
Family members could see anything stored on the PC

Thanks and I appreciate your recommendations

lets start with deciding what protocol...

FTP?
SFTP?
HTTP?
CIFS/SMB?


Many others I dare not mention.

I think in this instance your best way of controlling the granularity of your files access and simplicity will be registering a dyndns name, and using Filezilla.

Dyndns will allow you to register a DNS name and you can access something like:
ftp://JJ91284.dyndns.org
No matter what your IP has changed to at the location of hosting.

You can create users that have access to certain files. You choose who gets access to what and how many files are made available via your FTP solution.

You will need to port forward TCP/UDP port 21 to the box that's hosting the FTP.

EDIT: Here's a wiki page on the network configuration of Filezilla. http://wiki.filezilla-project.org/Network_Configuration

I would completely avoid putting any personal information on a publically available FTP though. That's just a bad idea in general.

Server 2008 is overkill if you are just trying to share some files. As was mentioned before, running FileZilla ftp server should be easy to setup. You will probably run into issues trying to use the native Server 2008 ftp server.
Or maybe you can setup a VPN and have people connect to that, then map their drives. (for family members). You would not want to transfer large files over that though.

What does Comcast say about running a web site off your connection? I know some won't let you do that and will shut off your service if they catch you running certain services off your connection.

Also what is the upload speed for comcast?

but yeah, that doesn't sound like a very good setup overall. I would have family and friends VPN into your computer or something to get files if you need them to have access to that much stuff, then just setup the site and a ftp server (or web based upload however you want to do it) for people to upload videos for that forum.

Sounds like you need Tonido.. http://www.tonido.com/