Home Server Rooms?

Tuzanor writes "I've got a buddy moving into a brand new house. Being geeks, we've decided to wire the house with a large home network. While this story took care of wiring the house, we need to figure out how to create a well set up server room. We'll be having both towers and rack mounted computers as well as various switches, UPSes, etc. Also, we figure this room will get warm, even in winter. How may we cool it while still keeping the rest of the house toasty warm on a cold Canadian night (without opening a window)"

Comments

Why would you need a big and hot server room?

[Billly Gates]

This is just a regular house and not an office right? Big servers mainly are used to handle hundreds and even thousands of users at once. An old pentium pro or even pentium1 can be fine for a file server or a web server. With improvements from the 2.4 linux kernel and freebsd around, you can make a scalable server easily with an old p166 with just 64 megs of ram. An example is the link ( too lazy to print it) here on slashdot with the linux powered christmas tree. A single pentium100 with only 64 megs of ram running the newer 2.4 kernel survived the slashdot effect running dynamic perl cgi scripts. Pretty impressive.

I believe connection bandwith is going to kill a webserver in your home more then computer hardware. The benchmarks you read here on slashdot that are conducted in labs are tested with multiple gigbit ethernet connections fiber connections to simulate loads from backbones of huge networks. A T1 I believe has a max bandiwith of only 1.5 megs a second and a good dsl line barely give you 1 to 2 megs of data a second if your lucky enough to live close to a CO. Basically, even an old pentium100 will likely sit mostly idle while your dsl gets saturuated with data. In other words a server room may be overdoing it.

You only need a 486 for a firewall, an old pentium1 or pentium2 for a web server and another pentium1 or 2 for a fileserver. If you want you can even build a dual filserver/webserver combo if your wallet is hurting. Buy some some 20-40 gig scsi drives and an old scsi-2 adapter( you will never use all the nadwith of a scsi 160, unless you want to use raid) for a few hundred dollars and stick them in the file server or webserver and your done. No need for a server room here. Of course its nice to play around with old hardware so maybe a lab in the basement may suffice for goofing around but i doubt it would ever get really hot. Older hardware tends to run alot cooler then modern hardware with a few exceptions( cough pentium60). A pentiumII 233 fileserver will always stay cool. Even when running at %100 utilization. May pentiumIII700 is always cool to the touch. Newer hardware today in my opinion is overclocked crap and I wouldn't buy it for any of your servers. I am glad I am not in the new market for a pc today. Infact I believe no computer should even be cooled with a cpu fan. If it needs a fan then its overclocked in my book. The computer rooms that run really hot have 20-100 servers all closely racked together in a small area. Only corporate and university users run anything like this.