Hardware Recommendations for a School Server? 124
nychef asks: "My school has decided to give me money to set up a server for my club. I'll be running e-mail for about 250 people, and webpages for about 100 which will mostly be static webpages, but there will be a few dynamic ones. I am trying to figure out just how powerful I need the hardware to be. They gave me a pretty decent budget, but my budget is to include the internet line. So I want to maximize bandwidth and minimize the cost of the server. I am looking in the range of dual P4 2.8's with a 3 disk RAID5 stack and 1 GB of ram. Is this adequate or overkill?" nychef has a budget of about $4,000. What kind of hardware and bandwidth options do you think he can afford?
bandwidth (Score:5, Informative)
As far as what you stated, it seems adequate. That is the same # of people I support at work and we have dual p4's as well with 3 disk raid5 and 1gb ram on linux.
Chris
Re:bandwidth (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:bandwidth (Score:4, Insightful)
I totally agree, go with a hyperthreading processor to help simulate multiple processors, but stick with a single processor solution. If you are supporting that many individuals, you also may want to consider a backup solution, and back up all of the e-mail and web data on a regular (weekly) basis. For what you are doing, you might get by with an external firewire or USB2 hard drive that you connect once a week and start a copying script before you leave friday night.
Re:bandwidth (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:bandwidth (Score:1)
I'm using a setup with Cyrus-IMAP and squirrelmail to do webmail, and that is kinda slow for just one person on my 200mhz system...
What server software are you running?
Re:bandwidth (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, it could probably do with a bit more RAM, but speed-wise it's coping very well.
Re:bandwidth (Score:2)
Sure, but what if when he's done he posts a link to his new server here on Slashdot?
Re:bandwidth (Score:1)
If you are hosting the server at your own locations, say the school itself, then getting the bandwidth there will probably cost you a bit, depending on what you want, . DSL with a fixed IP address would cover your needs fine.
If you are hosting at a co-lo center, bandwidth is cheaper, they already have a lot, and just resell it over their switch(or whatever setup...).
My recommendation is to get a hosted solution, either a shared server
Re:Bandwidth (Score:2)
All of the discussions so far have been concerned with the inbound traffic which quite honestly are going to be negligible unless you are hosting warez, pr0n, MP3z and Moviez, and maybe Blogz. If you don't host any of those and are merely hosting a hundred vanity pages (ooh ooh a picture of my dog. here is a picture of my house!!!1) then I wouldn't expect more than a hit per page per day. Of course I am a programmer so YMMV
Re:bandwidth (Score:1)
Overkill (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Overkill (Score:3, Informative)
Dual P4's is definitely overkill... if you really want to go with dual processors, take a look at getting dual Socket 370 P3 Tualatin processors and a compatible motherboard. That should provide more than enough processing power for e-mail, mailing lists, DNS, FTP, file sharing, web and datab
RAIC (Score:3, Informative)
Four thousand dollars (minus bandwidth fees - which are going to bite you if you don't anticipate them) will buy you a monster Dual Xeon machine with a PERC/3 SCSI RAID card and a Gig of DDR400, but honestly it looks like your process load is several discrete tasks
Re:RAIC (Score:1)
The NIC is built-in to the mother board. Loaded Slackware on it and have had no problems setting it up (I did have to manually load the USB modules, but that isn't much of a concern on A SERVER). It just s
Way overkill (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, your best bet is to colocate the box or rent a dedicated server somewhere. That will get you the most bandwidth for your money.
Re:Way overkill (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Way overkill (Score:2)
I would agree totally. Some dedicated servers running Linux are less than $80 per month and that includes the bandwidth. With that budget, youre getting an industrial strength server with more bandwidth a collection of busy halflife servers will need. Just make sure you keep the root account close and that you dont have to access the server. Some dedicated services Ive seen have a web-based reboot mechanism and you can keep a redhat install CD in the cdrom drive. Then you can start playing with it.
Re:Way overkill (Score:1)
I'm carrying over double the load mentioned in the article on a single Pentium Pro 200 right now.
And, it runs other tasks than just the e-mail and web server.
Simple fact: E-mail and static web serving are very "cheap" tasks for today's CPU's. Even adding in a spam filter and a small (postgresql is my suggestion) database server will be handled fine by this machine. It's the Internet connection that will cost you. (Heck, a Pentium 200, serving static web pages, can easily satura
Re:Way overkill (Score:2)
You have to work in education for a while before you get these things.
Way overkill! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Way overkill! (Score:1)
Dual anything for a private/small public server is way way overkill..
I had to face that reality myself when setting up my own various servers.
My personal home server is an AMD 850 that use as/with Apache/PHP/MySQL for developing, print server, personal ftp, capping TV PVR style, Samba share. Email is to come.
I've never had any issues, even when
Re:Way overkill! (Score:1)
With this setup Im not doing more then about 200kbit/s steady, using my ADSL connection. The specs for this box are as follows
Huge overkill (Score:3, Informative)
If you have the bandwidth such a server running a properly configured mail daemon could easily handle 10k messages an hour. Sendmail can be tricky to configure for maximum performance so try qmail or postfix.
Re:Huge overkill (Score:1)
Overkill (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Overkill (Score:1)
You don't need a big machine at all. Get a cheapie server in the 500 Mhz pentium III class, give it a good amount of memory and fast disks. You'll be in business for the next 5 years with that setup. You shouldn't have to spend more than $700. Even that might be a bit much, but you could look on E-bay for something with real server
Re:Overkill (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Overkill (Score:2)
Besides, most slashdotting occurs as either a) incorrectly set up connections to databases or b) bandwidth exceeded.
Re:Overkill (Score:3, Insightful)
In general, you are right tho. Dell makes excellent servers. It just doesn't fit the bill in this one.
Re:Overkill (Score:1)
Ye Ghods! (Score:5, Informative)
OTOH, if you've got the budget, spend it now. Either on hardware, or buy some nice dev tools for various commercial languages, see if Oracle will give you a copy of their db, and set things up so that people can be learning real world skills.
Oh, and make sure that there's a budget to replace broken parts. Just in case someone decides to swipe the UPS (you're getting a UPS, right?) and you get a lightning hit. (And don't forget backup! That's expensive by itself)
--
Evan
Re:Ye Ghods! -- Ditto That, Dude (Score:4, Informative)
I agree with most of the comments so far on that server being too beefy.
If I had $4,000 to buy hardware for the specified load, I'd buy two rack-mount single processor servers with 256M RAM (or 512M if the price is right) and mirrored 40G drives (80G if you really need the space). Processor speed would be my last concern. Anything better than an 850mHz Celeron processor would be more than plenty. That'll set you back $2,500 or less after educational discounts and whatnot.
With the leftover cash, buy a tape drive and UPS (if you don't already have good power). Recovering data, while a learning experience, is never fun. Better you have the experience of doing things right the first time.
By having two servers, you can play with one and still keep the other one in production. Nothing would suck more than setting up a server for your club and then never being able to do anything cool or experiment with it because so many people actually used it.
InitZero
Re:Ye Ghods! -- Ditto That, Dude (Score:1)
Buy a DVD writer, ($300), a stack of DVD-r's and you can do weekly backups for ~$5.
Total overkill (Score:3, Funny)
You could easily run what you need on a Celeron 500Mhz. In fact, even that would be somewhat of an overkill. Get at least 512 megs of ram. Even a gig isn't so bad. Ram is cheap.
If you'd like to play with failover, buy two of them.
Then with the $2000 you have left, buy yourself a really nice laptop. For, umm, support purposes.
Support (Score:1)
Options (Score:1)
Well look at it this way .... (Score:2)
I guess what I'm trying to say is your dual P4 2.8 will do the job quite nicely.
Just one thing, if you can, get hot swappable SCSI drives with a SCSI RAID controller. That way if a drive does bite the dust, it's easy to replace it without even stopping the server. These little things are always important.
Re:Well look at it this way .... (Score:1)
Speaking as a webmaster myself... (Score:2)
... the answer is not a whole lot (on the hardware side). Seriously, any server running linux will undoubtbly be good enough for you. As for bandwidth, the club which I'm the webmaster for [yucc.net] just piggybacks off the schools connection. If you can arrange something like that, go for it... but from the sounds of it, you can't.
To give you an idea, we were running our server up until about a year and a half ago on an old P150 with no problems. The current box is about a 1.4Ghz box with a bunch of harddrive space
UltraSparc III with debian (Score:3, Informative)
Another non-Intel option is a power macintosh G5. This beast is also 64-bit and is the most powerful desktop machine around. It could later be used for other educational stuff if people lose interest in the club or it is liquidated. I'm not sure if you can stably run Linux on it.
The bottom line is I recommend you get a non-intel platform for educational purposes.
Re:UltraSparc III with debian (Score:1)
First: the base model is 2,000 dollars. Thats a lot for a club.
Second: The machine is a graphics computer, not a web server. Unless he is hosting a virtual environment, it is overkill.
Third: Macs are so easy to set up, that the club members would learn little, unless they loaded yellowdog or something...but then the 64-bit functionality is lost.
I say get p4 system and load a Linux distro on it, or do as someone said and buy an old Sparc
Re:UltraSparc III with debian (Score:2)
It is easy to set up, yes, but you can get command-line geeky if you want to.
There's still no shipping date for the G5s ("on or before Sept 1" isn't a shipping date, I say), so I wouldn't consider it a serious option for this guy's club.
In the end, a G5 is big-fricking-time overkill for a small Web server and listserv/e-mail server. Grab a cheap ~1-GHz Pentium or AMD box, toss a L
Christ on a stick! (Score:2)
You're already done, if you've got the money for that kind of hardware. Rock on.
I'm deploying a fully dynamic (as in every page is at least asked if it should be dynamic, and most of it is) site, for a heavy volume, and your specs are close to mine. Sounds like you might be getting a server from CHhost or similar.
Damn, for a school, I'm not sure what you need, but Mason [htttp] kicks ass for rapid, easy development.
You are in WAY over your head, kid... (Score:5, Funny)
And you expect this to be feasible on a dual-P4 with a measly gig of RAM?
Remember that the Internet was set up as a project for the US military, and the WWW came from of a nuclear physics lab in Switzerland... I highly doubt you can approach the kind of performance needed to serve up honest-to-god web pages on mere consumer-grade hardware!
Your $4000 budget just might cover the water-cooling setup you'll need for a web server!
And that's assuming you don't need any of the web pages to be in color!
Re:You are in WAY over your head, kid... (Score:2)
I had to chuckle reading that.
Get a cheaper box. (Score:1)
what we do (Score:1)
instead of spending int money on expensive software spend it on having the books t run it.
instead of oracle use mysql
for email use qmail + vpopmail
http://www.mung.net/~dude/howto/Qmail-v p op-qmailad min.html
tis tell you how to set up a email server with challenges set to new emails to cut down on spam
(if you read the qmail faq, the author mentions that he wants to optimize the qmail server, as on a 486 with 16mb ram, it could 'only' handle 10,000 email a da
It wasn't that long ago (Score:2)
Perhaps one of the
Yeah...that horse is definitely dead.... (Score:5, Informative)
You don't say what your backup plans are, but a 20/40GB DDS4 tape drive is going to set you back a pretty penny [cdw.com]. And don't forget the tapes [cdw.com]. You can go with a Travan [cdw.com] drive for about half the price, but the tapes [cdw.com] are more expensive...and IMO they're crap.
You also don't say how large the websites will be, or what type of email you'll be doing (POP? IMAP? Web?) but you may want to think about how much diskspace you'll need. I'd think 36GB is plenty (5MBx250 for email (~1.25GB )+ 100MBx100 for websites (~10GB) + 30% = ~15GB.)
If you're really expecting to upgrade, you could get a dual CPU capable motherboard, but just get 1 CPU for now. Or, just plan on adding a second database server for the web sites later.
I'd estimate a 2.0+GHz P4 server, with 1GB RAM, DDS4 TBU, with 2x36GB SCSI drives in HW RAID-1 would run about $2,000 from Dell [dell.com]. Skimp on the CPU (down to a Celeron 1.5+GHz) and you can probably get around $1500 or so. You'd probably get a discount for non profit status. Oh, and don't forget a UPS.
it's not overkill (Score:5, Insightful)
Still overkill (Score:2)
A 500 MHz-ish machine should be more than enough for Q3. UT2K3 might start needing more CPU, if anything the more recent games need lots of HD space for the server, not CPU.
$4,000 budget? That's only $15/user. Ouch. (Score:5, Informative)
$4,000 per month? or $4,000 per year?
I don't know what kind of club you have, or what kind of users you have. But, I assume that the things you have to worry about, in order from most important to least important, are
- data reliability
- administration policy
- availability, and last,
- performance
.The biggest chunk of your budget (which is time and cash) should probably go to your backup solution and your security audit policy. Remember, RAID is NOT a backup. Nothing will torque your users more than losing all of their files when your RAID array is corrupted when you kick out the power cord at 3 am while doing routine maintenance. Having good backups is a must. However, your users probably will be nearly as torqued when some luser's PHP website goes bad and all the database passwords are sprayed across the web, or when one of the several monthly security patches doesn't get applied, and a l33t dude decides to take down the box.
The second biggest chunk of your time should probably go to your administration policies -- who gives out accounts, who terminates accounts, who helps with account problems, who deals with the results of the security audits, who is on call for server problems, who is given the administrator's cell phone number, etc.
When a user mistakenly does an rm -rf * on his entire web directory, who does he call? When a user wants to get back an email that he recieved sometime in June of 2001, who does he call? When a user wants to get his database backed up before he starts making big changes to it, who does he call? When a user needs a Perl module installed for his website, who does he call? When a user wants to add an entry to the DNS server, who does he call?
These are the things that your users will actually care about. They're also the biggest pains in the ass you can possibly imagine. This is why people pay for server administrators.
Next, think about availability. This includes simple things like how often stuff will break, and how quickly you will be to get the cash you'll need to replace the broken stuff. It also includes stuff like the DNS servers you'll be using, and the network line you'll be using, and the power supply to the building, and even the quality of the air conditioning in the room you'll have. Also, if you do have a secure location, who has the keys you'll need to get in there at 3 in the morning when you have to hit the reset button?
The LAST thing to consider is performance. It sounds like your entire server will fit on an old Pentium 66 with 128 mb of RAM. And, I imagine you'll be using the school's network, so I doubt you have to worry about paying the recurring network line lease costs.
You're looking at all of the sexy stuff with the server. Unfortunately, servers are not sexy. They're a pain in the ass. Having a Dual Pentium Xeon 2.8 GHz machine with 8 Gb of RAM is fun. Having 250 pissed off users calling you when a power outage corrupts your RAID array during finals week is not fun.
Re:$4,000 budget? That's only $15/user. Ouch. (Score:2)
In this case, a good answer would be "Stop wasting time emailing your web page to your friends and get back to cramming for your exams!" :-)
Re:$4,000 budget? That's only $15/user. Ouch. (Score:1)
well its obviosly not you if you are building the server now... ;)
Re:$4,000 budget? That's only $15/user. Ouch. (Score:2)
Second: Whom do the users call when they delete their important files? NO ONE, because the admin should be teaching the virtues of BACKING UP YOUR SHIT ON A REGULAR BASIS. Yes, the server should have a backup if it's remotely important, but the users should have their own copies, too. If the school burns to the ground, the users can't complain.
I'm not saying a user has to back up
Re:$4,000 budget? That's only $15/user. Ouch. (Score:2)
A user is someone who has a bunch of logical bits. The admin is a person who the user trusts to help him manage those bits. The admin works with the user to develop a plan to keep the bits available to some people, unavailable to other people, and keep them uncorrupted and recoverable. The computer itself is just one of the tools the admin u
Re:$4,000 budget? That's only $15/user. Ouch. (Score:2)
Re:$4,000 budget? That's only $15/user. Ouch. (Score:2)
That was my point. I've seen filesystems get hosed when the user shorts out the MB by plugging a keyboard into a dodgy port. Hardware breaks.
My personal experience is that with a moderate amount of monitoring, RAID is a good thing. However, my personal experience is also that majority of weekend-warrior sysadmins who install RAID will then go on to completely ignore the things until a year later, when the second drive in the
OVERKILL (Score:4, Interesting)
Fucking hell! That pretty much defines overkill for what you want to do....
I've a old compaq proliant P166 server with 192MB ram and about 20GB of storage, which works fine for web sites (small, with some PHP) and email for about 100 people.
Email (being store-and-forward) isn't a hassle with that size group unless they're sending 10MB attachments around the place.
Dual P4 2.8's might be able to serve a page up a second or so faster than my old piece of crap, but they aren't the bottleneck here, I'd say your network is.
Re:OVERKILL (Score:2)
Overkill... (Score:1)
Bandwidth for Free (Score:5, Informative)
This is all of course so long as Bush hasn't done yet another stupid thing.
Re:Bandwidth for Free (Score:1)
It's great that the inventor himself was able to maintain his hold on how his product is used. Good for him!
focus on disk i/o (Score:3, Insightful)
The RAID 5 configuration is going to be terribly slow for writing operations. Best to spend money on fast disks (15,000 RPM) and a RAID 0+1 or RAID 10 configuration. You lose 50% of your disk to the RAID but it will be much faster and much more resilient.
Do use squid to save on internet bandwidth (and make sure to peer with other caches).
I have some ideas on how to stretch your dollars and do this in a very efficient & resilient manner. Drop me an email if you would like to engage in more direct dialogue about this (see my site [trilug.org] for contact info).
How about (Score:3, Insightful)
RAID gives you fault tolerance. It doesn't help if the server burns up, or gets rooted, or you didn't really mean to rm that file, etc.
As to hardware needs, you can't buy a computer today that won't handle a bunch of static pages and 250 mail users. Put more money into "real server" features like RAID, ECC, and redundant power (and maybe a UPS?) and less into CPU. RAM is cheap, so it doesn't hurt to get a gig.
Finally, and you aren't going to want to hear this, make sure that your machine is not connected to both the Internet and (any of) your school's network(s). Or, at a bare minimum, that someone who is professionally responsible (read: not you) puts a firewall between your box and the school's network(s), with the assumption that your box is hostile. The administration is not going to be amused if your box is used as a stepping-stone into the school's systems.
Good Luck!
-Peter
dual P4's ? (Score:2, Informative)
You will be looking for a long time, as there are no multiprocessor P4 systems.
Re:dual P4's ? (Score:2)
=)
Re:dual P4's ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:dual P4's ? (Score:1, Insightful)
Waaaaay overkill. (Score:1)
What you're talking about could easily survive the slashdot effect with PHP o
Give me most of the money ,then EBAY (Score:1)
Oh, then give me the rest of the money. Our budget got cut, and
Free server offer (Score:2, Informative)
1. Send me a request to ship it on school stationary
2. I ship it to you COD for the shipping
The machine was a server at a charity that upgraded (received a new donation or server hardware). It is fully operational, and comes with a spare hard disk. I can load it with your preferred version of Linux (RH9 is what I would
Re:Free server offer (Score:1)
Good on you, mate (Score:2)
There you go -- you now have some spare cash to spend on a backup solution, which is probably the most important item you need after an actual functioning server.
Small shpiel (Score:2)
Setting up a server for a school environment is one thing, but setting up an internet server for your school environment is another beast, if you are going to be housing 100+ webpages and if even just one of them starts getting hammered without some good QoS and decent Bandwith Quotas on those sites you're gonna run outa bandwith. (r
Re:Small shpiel (Score:2)
At least a Celeron ..... 400mhz ;-) (Score:1)
Oh yeah run Linux, less overhead = cheaper box = more $$ for stuff you REALLY need.
Why not use (Score:1)
overkill... (Score:3, Interesting)
I administer a number of small schools networks and one in particular is a good example to compare to your needs. The school has about 275 users on a daily basis. This server handles e-mail, webserving, and is also a firewall/router for a 512k DSL line. It is a dual p2 450 with 1Gb ram and 2 10GB scsi in RAID1. This machine servers a static page for each student, and about 15 pages of misc school information. This machine also servers dynamic content from a database on the schools greenhouse class and also has a internet available copy of the schools library inventory and availability as the school library functions as the town's library.
as you can see, this machine is not very powerful but performs numerous takes easily. I have zero problems with this machine and I would consider keeping the current setup up to about 350 users. This machine is a Dell Poweredge in case you are wondering.
Thoughts about the world next to CPU,RAM,HDD (Score:1, Interesting)
You do not need as much computing power (CPU and RAM). And you lack other things, since a server has other priorities first:
Redundancy & Saftey/Security
You need to ensure a 24/7 installation. This means, that you need to ensure, power-failure is not an issue. So you need redundant power-supply.
This means 2 PSUs.
Also you need to have a strategy what to do if power goes completly down (city, district, whatever). For this you will need a backup-power-supp
Do you have to use Windows? (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh, what do you mean you're not running Photoshop?
My experience and suggestions (Score:1)
We arent that many users but then again several of us are power-users thus using more cycles and RAM than your intended users.
Our budget was way less than yours but im quite happy with what we got:
P4 2400MHz/533
1GB RAM
3x80GB 7200RPM IDE-drives (RAID-1 for two of them, third is a scratch drive for projects - maybe upgraded to RAID-5 soon)
and a nice Ant
Use an old G3! (Score:3, Interesting)
If this is a school, there's probably one of these under a pile of Apple posters in the Photo Lab. Take it.
The G3 will get great performance for its cost and power requirements, it has no need for a cpu fan so there's less to clean or fail. Linux on PowerPC is amazingly fast, and the fact that you're running on an obscure arch should even protect you from some exploits. Also, there 800MHz upgrades for these things, but you'll never need them.
Put 1GB ram into it. Put a 36GB SCSI drive in. Buy a SCSI drive enclosure for another 36GB drive, and hook that one up externally. Have your internal drive backup to the external every night at 3:00am.
Invest decent money in a good UPS and make sure the room you put this stuff in is environmentally sound (no leaks, flaking walls, rats, bugs, heat). The G3 will stand a few cm off the floor anyway on it's feet, but consider a cheapo-moisture sensor that warns you if pipes burst. Keep that external drive at least 3 feet from the CPU.
Install Gentoo. Seriously, you'll get to be 'at one' with the machine and you'll only get what you ask for, I don't know many people who switch FROM gentoo to anything else.
Re:Gentoo (Score:1)
I did. It worked great, I got a new machine and didn't feel like spending another week setting it up. With Knoppix I was up and running with a usable desktop, newest KDE, Gnome, Apache, X in under an hour.
And I've never felt the speed dif. between Gentoo and Debian. Gentoo and RH, yes. Gentoo and SuSE, ABSOLUTELY, but Debian is a
Re:Gentoo (Score:2)
Also, I found apt-get very confusing, but emerge makes a LOT of sense to me. Just a personal opinion.
Don't need much. (Score:4, Interesting)
We ran mailing lists, email for the teachers, Apache, and always 1-2 Quake servers and it barely broke a sweat.
Had 64M RAM (maybe only 32?) and a 2G HD. The only thing that it really could've used more of was HD space.
Buy one of those Walmart Lindows boxes, install a more suitable Linux distro on it. (RedHat for the lazy, but you might squeeze more out of it with something like Gentoo. I'm lazy and so I use RedHat even though it's not the most space-efficient.) Those boxes come with 128M RAM, a 10G HD, and 3-4 times as much processor power as the box my HS used. Also, I didn't have a small high school - When I graduated we had about 1800 students (Although at that time only teachers had email addresses, with the exception of the student sysadmins.)
easy: overkill (Score:1)
I say go for it! (Score:1)
Besides, It's always nice to have the extra power available. I know I hate working with anything less than a Pentium II with 128MB ram just because they are slow to compile software or do other common administrat
Software recommendation (Score:2, Interesting)
This makes things much safer if one of the services is compromised, as it won't affect the rest that much.
You can even give the jails' root passwords to co-admins: i.e. everyone has to care about one single service.
Overkill overkill (Score:2)
BTW, anything more than an Intellivision running IntyOS on a dual cassette drive is completely overkill.
Overkill !!@@#$!@ (Score:2)
You need
C64 Computer with diskdrive [oldsoftware.com]
Contiki Web Server [dunkels.com]
C64 Ethernet Card [dunkels.com]
Set all the users limits to 15k an you can keep them all on one floppy. Since you'll spend at most $300 on hardware that leaves $3700 for pizza and beer
SD
What kind of club? (Score:2)
I went to a fairly large HS (3000ish), and when I was there, I doubt the entire computer lab was worth $4000 at the time.
HP/Compaq education discounts. (Score:2)
Equipped with a 2.66GHz P4, 512MB DDR memory, dual 10/100 nics and a pair of 80GB ATA/100 drives as RAID1 on the internal IDE raid controller will give you all the fault tolerance and performance you need. RedHat 9.0 installs and runs perfectly on this box. I just built one myself last week as a little samba server for a public
Qube, RaQ, or better -- SME Server... (Score:2)
I wouldn't buy a Wal-Mart Linux machine for this reason -- the hardware is not commercial grade, designed to run 24/7 for years without crapping out. Reliability is key. You might look i
Re: SME Server... (Score:1)
SME Linux is odd, if you intend to actually learn about how to admin a linux box properly, don't use SME Linux.
It does have an admin interface, which is nice, but if you want to do anything slightly differently to the way it wants you to, it gets all huffy.
All the files in
Go for something a bit more standard (Debian being my choice) with webmin and I suspect you will learn a lot more without the learning c
Dude, Get a Dell! (Score:1)
What I'd do... (Score:3, Interesting)
- P4 2.8c
- Asus MB
- 1GB RAM
- 120GB IDE HD
- Burner (you'll want a CD to install, spring for the extra $15.)
- Floppy
- Any video
- Decent case with a good PSU.
- 3 year warranty
This will run you under $1500CDN.
For backup I'd get a USB2.0/Firewire external 5.25" enclosure and a HD rack to go in it, then I'd get another 120GB HD for the backup. USB2.0/FW isn't as "cool" as hot-swappable SCSI, but it gets you 90% there for 10% (likely less) of the cost.
Anyway, grand total for all of this is still under $2kCDN. You get a great, cheap, easily upgraded backup method, a very powerful machine and thousands to spare.
As for an OS, I like Debian or FreeBSD, RH9 if you want something that looks flashy.
Speakins of flashy, if you're new to Unix, an Apple XServe is another option. It's relatively cheap and is supposed to be a joy to administer. (It'll likely eat most of your money, though.)
While 250 users sounds like a lot, my last employer is still using an ancient Sun SparcServer 5 for its several hundred employees and departmental web server. That system runs about as fast as a low-end pentium and it has handled the load without complaining for years.
Balance the power to the bandwidth (Score:2)
Ram - well, you need at least 1/2 Gb, and the extra is not much.
Disks: you have put in 3 in a Rai
Get a decent laptop, that way you have a battery (Score:1)
Re:Just determine downtime acceptability... (Score:3, Informative)
I agree with you that if he's serious about running a server he should just go buy a used server.
But, unless he buys a used eMachine from a guy in a back of a van, I doubt the hardware is going to be the significant factor in his machine's availability. Some of the problems are going to be hardware related -- a UPS fails, or the server room air conditioning fails, or a network switch fails, or a land-line gets cut by a backhoe, or the janitor hits the machine hard wit