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There are many open source nas implementations available: FreeNAS OpenFiler and NASLite to name a few. I have personnaly set up 3 different NASLite boxes, and is the one I recommend for stability and simplicity (It is not free, but reasonable--around $35US). You will, however need to connect the laptop to a monitor for initial installation and setup.

It is based on a recent version of the kernel and has good support for hardware RAID controllers and Gigabit NICs. The cost is very reasonable. If you don't want to spend the bucks for hardware RAID, it also supports once-per-day disk mirroring. I'm using it with an old Pentium III box with excellent results.

http://www.serverelements.com/

Easy one, NASLite, who else has a samba server on a floppy disk!

http://www.serverelements.com/

How about adding a hardware raid card and use the new NASLite v2.0

http://www.serverelements.com/naslite-2-usb.php [serverelements.com]

This is the page for the software; http://www.serverelements.com/naslite.php

NASLite from http://www.serverelements.com/ allows you to use quite ancient hardware (eg Pentium 1 or 2) and get a 4 (or even 8 with the latest version) hard drive NAS up and running with SMB, NFS, FTP and HTTP access. Took me about 10 mins (not including formatting), and only had to buy the hard drives since people virtually throw away machines that this can run on! Worth every cent of it's modest fee IMHO. (I have no affiliation to NASlite)

Naslite (free version) worked great on my salvaged P-100 32MB system running quiety and headless with nothing but a floppy drive and a 300GB HD. Luckily, it recognized the large HD (since Linux/etc bypasses bios) and I didn't need an IDE card. Performance was acceptable (good but not great) for small base of users but I wouldn't want to stick a RAID in it or have more than 5 nodes. The total system consumed total of 25-30watts (a little high compared to NSLU). Freenas looked good except for higher amount of ram(96m which I didn't have.

How is this any different than the OpenFiler Project [openfiler.org]?

A company called Server Elements offers a port of Linux OS for a small fee that makes any old computer into a NAS. Unfortunatly at this time their are not offering raid support. With that said, this may not be for you. However I find it useful for backing up my data incase of a large drive blowout. I am hoping in the future they do come out with a version that supports RAID. Here's a link to them

If you have some older hardware about, check this out:
NASLite

A customized Linux bootable floppy specifically designed to turn an older machine into NAS (in 5 minutes they claim), even bypassing the BIOS to support larger hard drives on motherboards that couldn't otherwise see them. Unfortunately, it does not support RAID.

Sadly, shifting in storage destroyed the motherboard I was planning to use for my own NAS system, so I can't currently give any personal experience comments.

http://www.serverelements.com/naslite.php

there is a linux floppy distro that turns an old P-133 box into a NAS server.. naslite

We use a P-133 only because we need to handle the full 100BaseT data transfer rates. They serve files faster than the W2003server on the P-III 866 proliant in the same rack.

we have 4 of these boxes, each with 4 200 gig drives in them with no drive settings in the bios.

they work perfectly as samba media servers for our AVID editing suites here.

Boot this in you old laptop http://www.serverelements.com/naslite.php