rossz's Journal: Choosing a Server

As mentioned in my previous entry, my server committed suicide. I'm in the process of picking out a replacement system. I'm leaning towards the Shuttle as a nice, compact, and complete system. It has most everything you need for a server. Toss in a drive, cpu, and memory and it's complete. It's major downside is the 200W power supply. Because of that limitation, I won't be putting a cd burner in it (just a budget CD reader). Instead, I'm going to get an external USB 2.0 DVD burner. That way I can easily move it between systems if necessary.

I'll probably go for a low end processor of about 1.3Ghz since that is plenty for my needs. I'll stick in half to a full gig of memory and the biggest hard drive my budget allows. Comments and suggests are welcome. It's going to be a few weeks before I have the money to make the purchase so I'm spending the time looking at all options. The software I'll be running is:

• Linux (of course) with a 2.4.2? kernel (what ever is recent and stable)
• Apache w/PHP
• MySQL
• Exim 4.x
• ClamAV
• SpamAssassin

Plus the usual array of tools (especially perl scripts).

A big concern is compatibility with a USB 2.0 DVD Burner. If anyone has experience with these under Linux, I would appreciate hearing from you. Make/Model, software used, etc. Also, I could use some suggestions for content management. I need something that makes it relatively painless for my wife and daughter to update their own web pages. The tool(s) must be able to handle virtual domains.

I love my mine

[kikta]

I just got the AMD-compatible one two weeks ago & I love it! I'm running an Athlon XP 2100+ (1734MHz) with Crucial 512MB PC2100 for RAM. I have a Maxtor 20GB 7200RPM HDD and Hitachi 16X DVD-ROM. I also threw in a GeForce2 GTS w/64MB RAM. I'm not having any power problems with it (though I was a little worried about that, too).

It's running RH9 & doing a lot of stuff with Apache, Perl, & MySQL on it for our biology department (they want to do some genome analysis, the crazy bastards). It's quite

Also...

[kikta]

I wish I had gone for a bigger HDD, since I've used a little under 10GB so far & I like to have plenty of room to grow. The RAM is perfect, though. I usually have over 300MB free & I don't think I've ever touched the swap partition.

Re:I love my mine

[rossz]

You can fit a second HD in it if you yank the floppy. At least that's what I was told in the shop.

FYI, if I get a Shuttle, it will be the AMD model. That's a given.

Re:I love my mine

[kikta]

Yes, you can fit another HDD, but I want to keep the floppy for now. I want to upgrade to a bigger drive, but I'm unsure how to resize my ext3 root partition once I copy it over.