building an old-hardware server
ANdrei
lists at hausro.de
Tue Aug 15 00:58:12 UTC 2006
been searching the archives and reading articles the whole day, but still
want to get some opinions (sorry for the long post, I want to detail
everything in one mail, hope someone fins the patience to read through it
quickly and give some advice):
am building a webserver, which will also do some basic file serving in the
LAN and have a MySQL database running... nothing too fancy, but the budget
is 0$, so only recycled HW can be used... of course I want it to run as fast
as possible, but more important: reliable. Will put 6.1-Release on it.
here is what I got:
ASUS P2B-DS Dual Processor Slot1 motherboard with Adaptec SCSI (FAST, WIDE
and Ultra) onboard
384MB PC-100 SDRAM
2xIntel PII 350MHz CPU (100MHz FSB)
Teac 32x SCSI CDROM
Panasonic 8x IDE CDROM
Inno3D S3 Savage4 extreme 32MB AGP graphic card
3Com 3C905B-TX Fast Ethernet XL 10/100 NIC
I cannot decide on the HDD: the board supports UDMA33 for IDE and
Fast/Wide/Ultra for SCSI (but I have only fast/SCSI-2 HDD anyway). My
options are:
-one 15GB Maxtor IDE (or some 20GB Fujitsu IDE, but I had some of them fail,
so I'd avoid them) with UDMA if I can get it for free (not 100%)
-one or two 4.3GB Fujitsu IDE with UDMA
-alot of small (around 1GB) IDE hard drives
-a few identical SCSI-2 (10Mbps) 5400rpm hard drives, each 2GB
-2 non-identical SCSI-2 7200rpm hard drives (1GB and 2GB)
I think 4-6 disks fit in my case. As my processors are not so fast, I'd like
to have fastest disk access with minimum CPU load (ideal case, right? :).
What would get me best results: SCSI or IDE (will the IDE be faster than my
7200rpm or 5400rpm SCSI?). Should I consider doing software RAID, will I see
any speed improvement? I expect around 10-20 users doing random things on
this server, not too heavy though, no GUI for them.
I was thinking about the 7200rpm SCSI drives for the system and root, a RAID
for the home/database (minimum 2GB should be enough for this, SCSI or IDE?)
and 4GB (or more) IDE for space/builds/ports/logs etc...
Any suggestions are welcome, I have never tried to build such a "recycled"
system from so many smaller harddrives, so this is my main dilemma.
About the hardware I already have: would one 600MHz PIII be faster, on this
board or another (choices are Gigabyte GA-BX2000 with Intel 440BX chipset,
supports PC-133 RAM - or Fujitsu-Siemens D1107 - Intel 443BX 100Mhz bus)? I
considered the 2x350MHz to be faster in SMP for the variety of tasks this
system will do, and I can upgrade at some moment... And I also have SCSI
support on this board.
Is the RAM too much on the minimum side? Have little experience with SMP
systems, but more SDRAMs are hard to find...
Any issues with the S3 Savage4 AGP cards? They tend to be slow, but I think
for this system this won't be the bottleneck, as the Mobo supports AGP2x and
the card is 4x already...
I have considered the NIC to be important here. I've read through hundreds
of articles, and the 3C905B seems to be quite fast and low on CPU load.
Other alternatives were Kingston KNE110TX (seems to have some bugs according
to the dc man page), D-Link DFE-530TX (rhine based, also buggy according to
man page AND D-Link="let it be" according to users), some Davicom DM9102AF
based cards (seem ok, but more on the low quality end) and the "loved"
RTL8139C/D ones (buggy, right?). I don't expect sustained heavy traffic, but
peaks...
Any feedback is welcome, on the list or on my email, as I am in a hurry with
putting the machine to work and cannot take my time and test all possible
configurations...
ANdrei
http://students.oamk.fi/~t6ruan00/
------
Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down
to their level then beat you with experience...
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