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Hardware Recommendations for a School Server?
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?
Bandwith is a recurring charge. Is this budget to just setup the line or to pay for it for a period of time. That is a big factor.
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
Dual P4's would be overkill for your needs. You could get away with substantially less. The RAID array would be nice but again you can easily get away with doing routine backups.
For what you stated, a P2/233 would work just fine. You could get two IDE drives and a 3ware card and use RAID 1. Anything else is overkill.
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.
Get two of those $200 PCs from Walmart (or comparable), network them, upgrade them with some more memory, and set one up as a hot-swapable replacement should the other die. With only 250 email accounts and a hundred-ish web sites you'd be flying.
The static web pages could be served up on a p75 easily. The email depends heavily on how much it will be used. If you are planning to run some listservs off of it or such it might require some decent hardware behind it, but most likely something in the 400 to 500 mHz range could handle normal usage.
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.
Only 250 people, email and web - you could run it fine on a single P3, with 256 / 512M of RAM ( I assume linux or BSD). Being educational, you get great prices on hardware from Dell or Compaq or what have you - probably cheaper than buying parts. Don't spend more than 1500 bucks on the server (including RAID). Check out the Dell 1650's, maybe a low-end IDE-based rackmount would work great. FYI, I am an engineer at a moderate public school district (~60K kids), and we don't have ANY dual p4 servers yet :)
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
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
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.
If you want to scale back somewhere, try the CPUs. A smart move may be to scale back to 2 GHz or below (no sense in going too far below 1 GHz though unless you can get a really good deal) and buy bigger hard drives because you're going to run out of space eventually and either have to upgrade or more strictly ration disk space. 1 GB of RAM is good to have, especially since it's cheap and would be handy in case you decide to run a DBMS or X server or something in the future in addition to the web and email servers.
The nice thing about servers is that nothing much matters other than the hard drives, RAM, CPU(s), and networking hardware. Peripherals (if any) can often be any cheap old stuff that may be lying around already.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
Years ago, I set up a mail/web/dns server for an ISP with 1000 users. The hardware I used ... a Pentium 100 with 64MB ram running Slackware Linux.
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.
Lets be realistic - Get a stable intel board and any cpu between 1-2ghz, 1/2gb of memory, 2 good SCSI disks (they will outlast the rest of the box) and a SCSI DDS tape drive. Local/offsite backups will serve you better than raid.
Is the 4k annual, monthly or one time? if it's one time you are gonna have to go cheap on the connectivity.
... 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 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.
Use them Sun Ultra machines from eBay. Theyre pretty cool, runs 64-bit although the kernel if I remember runs at 32-bit and the CPU has plenty of registers and can give you good IO. This will also introduce a non-Intel platform to your friends.
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.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
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 kicks ass for rapid, easy development.
I forget what 8 was for.
Static webpages for 100 people?
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!
RAID is fine, go for 512 megs of ram unless they all run an SQL, and for God sake don't make it a dual processor job. Just one PII 450Mhz serves up 75+ dynamic sites (users) per day with well over one gig of transfer per day. All on a 300K line. Don't just take my word for it - read my log anylizer. Just save some money for bandwidth. (Also note that performance of my perl log parser is slow as my log files are ~ 150 MB.)
We're only gonna die from our own arrogance, that's why we might as well take our time...
luckily, stupid fucking responses are free-of-charge
huge overkill, but you need it to dual processors.
p op-qmailad min.html
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
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 day !
for builing websites go with zope
for the websrver: apache of course,
i dont see you spending more than maybe 1K-1.5K
the rest the information to run it
hope this helps
Sigs are dangerous coy things
It wasn't that long ago that the machine you've described would have been as powerful as the machine running Slashdot.
/crew would care to give an exact date, but hell, I could run a web server written in TCL that would meet your usage specs given the hardware you've spec'ed.
Perhaps one of the
www.eFax.com are spammers
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. And don't forget the tapes. You can go with a Travan drive for about half the price, but the tapes 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. 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.
People are saying it's overkill, but it's not, once you realize you'll be able to run a (Q3|UT2K3|CS|whatever game) server on it to play during class time.
$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.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
dual P4 2.8's with a 3 disk RAID5 stack and 1 GB of ram
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.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
I would consider a grendel cluster of lunix boxen...
Where I worked, we supported 1500 users' email on a low-end Pentium (like 100 Mhz) with WinNT 4.0. Our webserver was a K6-2 400, 128 MB ram, NT 4.0, and served a combination of dynamic/static pages fine. Get yourself any old P3, give it at least 128 MB or ram, and you'll do fine.
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
Check with the Dept of Education. One of the things that Al Gore did that was really nice was give dirt cheap rates (sometimes free depending on the school and their demographics) on T1 lines for schools and educational institutions. It's been years since I waded through the paperwork for a school but believe me it's worth it. They even give you a stipend for the router and switch.
This is all of course so long as Bush hasn't done yet another stupid thing.
First of all the CPU horsepower is overkill.
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 for contact info).
a tape drive?
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
You will be looking for a long time, as there are no multiprocessor P4 systems.
OP - you don't say you are limited to one machine, so (I am amazed nobody has suggested this yet) consider a Beowulf Clu ... just kidding. Not a cluster, but a RAIC (redundant array of inexpensive computers - I coined that phrase a while back.)
... you could fill an entire server farm with machines that would have been considered world class less than a year ago.
.. unless the failure is a dead drive, in which case you can pull one from this machine and restore to it and still be right back online) and you will have a server farm with several machines for you to do manual load balancing on - you could support a serious workload on that rig.
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 that can easily be split up across several machines.
If you are a little creative, have a little flexibility you can catch servers on sale at Dell Small Business, use a 10% or 15% coupon off the entire sale (available in the emails they send out several times a month, or watch the forums at www.fatwallet.com) and if you happen to catch the machines when they are trying to blow them out
Catch them in a few days when they are running free shipping and either double the RAM or some hard drive promotion or a CPU upgrade promotion (don't hassle with the rebates, too much of a grey area in this case.) Also, minimize the memory and buy upgrades from Crucial.com (Dell OEMs memory upgrades from Crucial, you can save about a third by buying direct.)
If you catch them with the free hard drive with any hard drive upgrade you can upgrade to an 80G 7200rpm drive and have them throw in another one free.
What kind of price / performance can you expect?
My last machine was a P4/2.4GHz with 128M RAM, 40G 7200rpm drive, Gigabit NIC, floppy/cd/kb/mouse/mini-tower for $400.04 delivered. I am still waiting on a $100 rebate after three months, but if it comes in that drops the price to $300.04. Added a half Gig of RAM (ECC/Registered) for $80 ($100 minus a $25 coupon found at www.fatwallet.com) for a total of about $380 for a P4/2.4GHz, 640M, 40M IDE with a Gigabit NIC.
The machine before that was pretty much the same deal but with the 'free second hard drive free when I upgraded the first drive', $350 shipped for a 1.2GHz Celeron, 128M / 80G + 80G and a 100Mb NIC, complete with CD/floppy/kb/mouse. Caught RAM on sale, added a 1G stick for $100. Machine total $450 for a 1.2GHz machine with 1G RAM and 160G of 7200rpm drives.
With a little creativity you could put together four or five machines in that performance range, two 2-port KVM switches (Linksys with the built in cables, run you about $50 apiece) and two small monitors for around $2000. Throw in a single massive tape drive for backups (I am open to suggestions here), possibly hold back one machine as a hot spare if you order them all in identical configurations (simply pull the hard drives out of the failed machine, put them in this one, power it up and you are back up and running
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Wow, dual p4s? Honestly, unless you feel you want to game on that or something, don't even bother. From what you're talking about, it seems you could get away with one or two P1-100's serving (web, mail, and other network connections)--you can get those for free--and get maybe a pIII at most for file serving. Export useful directories using NFS, and let the P1's serve them. Unless you anticipate monster load, don't even worry.
What you're talking about could easily survive the slashdot effect with PHP or Perl generated pages, provided there was enough bandwidth. Unless you anticipate that kind of load (doubt it) you don't need anything more than an old pIII with enough ram (512 min) and a reasonably fast disk drive (ext3 boot partition and rieserfs for the rest).
Recursive (adj.): see 'Recursive'
Pick up some Compaq ProLiant Pentium Pro or Pentium 2 Xeon servers (or comparable) on eBay for cheap if you want some serious muscle. They should be <$1000. With something like that, you can serve many, many, many things. For instance, the school district where I'm the PFY (Think BOFH) runs mostly on these, but they picked up a few newer Xeons for some heavier-weight stuff (like their resource-pig student information/attendance server).
:-) Good luck! (and remember, you don't need anything that massive for a server!)
Oh, then give me the rest of the money. Our budget got cut, and I need a new motherboard.
I recognize people by their sigs. Is that a bad thing?
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!" :-)
aolserver (written in TCL) could do many factors of magnitude more than his usage requirements back when Xeons first came out.
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 recommend), or I can ship it blank if you want to add your own Windows OS.
This machine will more than meet your needs running linux, and it will meet them under windows as long as you are not using Exchange. Netwin (www.netwinsite.com) has good mail servers for windows and they do deals for schools. They provide webmail, scale really well and are very flexible and easy to administer.
Drop me a response if you want to go ahead with this and I'll send you my address.
Dean
CC via email
Well... you have many different options. First off, I'd say don't stop with just money from your school for this. APPLY FOR GRANTS. Now, that that is said, I'll continue.
.... and if you were only given 4000 dollars for internet line as well... as an educational estabilshment you're screwed. Normally the telco would waive the install fee on a T1 because of the absurdly high rates they charge, but unfortunately if your school is erated, you gotta pay out of pocket for that... which can range from $900-1300.
Setting up a server for a school environment is one thing, but setting up an internet server for your school environment is another beast, if you are going to be housing 100+ webpages and if even just one of them starts getting hammered without some good QoS and decent Bandwith Quotas on those sites you're gonna run outa bandwith. (rule #1 in providing services to schools, if kids have bandwith they WILL use it.)
As many have pointed out, keep this thing off the school network, APPLY FOR A GRANT, (get it E(ducation)RATED) But get a pipe for this seperate from your school network. a T1 circuit can be insanely cheap Erated (20-70$ a month).
Always use this machine with the idea that the data WILL be compromised. If at all possible a tape backup system for the mail/website data would be ideal.
Finally, no matter how much you want to, and when you get swamped with buerocratic nonsense halfway through the year, DON'T let the students administer this machine if you want it to be low maintanence. If you do, the server will be in disarray more often than not, as the server will be a playground for the noob.
And finally, a border firewall would be excellent, even better would be something like a iptables fw prerouting the ports you want access to from the internet. And if you are paranoid enough, a local firewall on the webserver itself, although some would question the reliability of this.
As for hardware, it really depends on load
So an iptables firewall PII or something, with enough ram to handle a few hundred thousand nats ebay says.......(there are probably a few of these laying around at your school)
$240
Two nics for the firewall, 5prt mini switch
~$50
T1 Installation fee:
$1100
left over for server?
2630
even with Ed. pricing, that's gonna be a pretty thin machine.
Since this isn't life or death, you could probably get away with a dual XP machine, with 512m-1gig of ram an IDE raid array and beg really hard for some money for a tape backup.
What type of downtime is acceptable? If you would rather not have downtime, you should probably invest in an older server (such as the Compaq Proliant ones) with redundant power supplies and a raid controller. It doesn't have to be expensive, the PII and Pentium Pro ones can be had for peanuts.
One word of warning though.. they are noisy!
And another word of warning.. if you end up ordering parts, you'll end up paying quite a bit. But they are very reliable. We've had one particular PII running for 6 years non-stop (windows, too!)
- Budget: $4000
- Wal-mart PC: $200
- You pocket: $3800
Seriously, you can't be much at this if you want such a huge machine to run a bunch of kids' web pages. Does your school have a library? How about not getting a computer and buying $4000 worth of useful books.I work at a colocation and dedicated server facility. We also host almost 12000 websites. You can put 100 websites and 250 mail users on ANY box you can find. Seriously. Celeron 400 or higher, 128MB ram although 256 will be better. Get a couple of 60GB IDE drives, and make a cron job to back up the critical files to the second drive nightly.
Oh yeah run Linux, less overhead = cheaper box = more $$ for stuff you REALLY need.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
A middle of the road G4. You will have Apache, Perl, PHP, ease of use, and configuration...pop for AppleCare. You will have a box that will serve you well and is upgradeable. That's if you want to spend 2500 - 3000 or so. I am not a mac phreak but for this use it would be a good way to spend those kinds of bucks. I honestly would build a PC running RH or Mandrake and go at it that way...but you have to figure someone else will inherit this box someday..I presume.
"What we do in life echoes in eternity." Maximus Decimus Meridius
well its obviosly not you if you are building the server now... ;)
Bottles.
I agree that this setup is quite overkill.
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.
1) Get a decent, stable board and the cheapest CPU that'll fit on it. Make sure you go with a reliable chipset (something by Intel or Nvidia; with the former, a 1.8A P4 would be more than enough; with the latter, a 1700+ will do). If you INSIST on SMP, get a dual-Athlon setup, as it's gonna be a hell of a lot cheaper than dual Xeons. A pair of 1GHz Athlon MPs and an MPX motherboard can be had cheaply enough. But really, you don't need two CPUs that fast for this; a single CPU of any sort with at least 1GHz to it would do.
2) Add plenty of RAM (512MB or more).
3) Two large and identical hard drives, striped RAID 0. Probably 160GB'ers. Get a 2-channel 3ware hardware RAID card to RAID 'em; these are available cheap enough on eBay. Hardware RAID = GOOD. This'll be your most expensive component, but think about it. If you have around 100-200 members, this would mean that each should get almost a gigabyte of space each. They don't need that much. Allocate a hundred megs to each and they should all be fine and then some, and then you've got plenty of general storage space left over (public FTP?) and a second drive doing nothing but backing up the first.
4) Splurge and get a Radeon 9600 Pro. This server's so much overkill that you can play RTCW while you serve. Seriously. (If you don't take this seriously, just get a cheap but supported-in-Linux video card. I'd recommend an ATI card, from the Rage 128 to the Radeon 7000 series, as these have open-source drivers for them. Of course, if you got an Nforce2 setup, you wouldn't need a video card, as you've got video built in, which there are Linux drivers for.)
5) Get a case to put it all in, and put it all together. Add a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and you're done.
Overall, this is what, a thousand bucks or so? And it'll do everything you need it to and then some. If you really want more storage space, go ahead and get a 4-channel 3ware card and 4 hard drives instead of two (this'll add another $500-1000 to your costs, but oh well) and then you can have RAID 5 with your capacity being 3x your drive size (so 480GB usable space with 160GB drives).
Sorry, but your setup is nonsense. In two ways:
;-)
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-supply. (APC, Belkin, others).
It is not easy to find the right one, And they are not cheap either. You might want to get one that ensures enough power for the period of time you need to safly shut down the server.
Also you need storage-bakups.
I am a friend of tape-backups, however, todays HDD are so cheap and mighty, you might want to get yourself two 160GB drives in swap-mounts and use them for backup. Never leave them in the computers case ! Store them seperately.
RAID1 IS NOT SAFE ! Both machines are within the same machine, on the same controller. A serious electrical damage might render both drives unusable. However, RAID1 is good for redundancy, as first step. You should do it but STILL have a "real" backup. (As in "real" men)
Someone recommended DDS4. This is DAT technology. Very bad. I have a SONY DDS2 streamer myself and most of my backups are seriously damaged (these tapes are very easily damaged).
You should ask others about Onestream or VXA. I do not know them, but they look sympathic to mee. No experience on my side, though.
Now the last part, the case:
Sure, dedicated server stuff is best. 19" rackmount cases, with hot-swappable disks and redundant power-supply units. Get these. If not, then get a Midi-ATX-Server case with case-open warning, that REALLY can be colsed.
The "Casetech 1018" can be and has place for 9 fans, is Midi-ATX sized, 4x 5 1/4 extern, 2x 3 1/2 extern, 4-6x (forgot) 5 1/4 internal.
The case comes with a real lock and key (not those one fits all, that others sell) and once locked you cant open the case without the key at all. It also has chassis-intrusion.
However, this will give a problem: Should you need to exchange the PSU, you need to power the machine down for that time. With specialized rackmount-server cases the additional (redundant) PSU automatically jumps in if needed. That is by design.
So either real server stuff (not cheap) or "home-brew" stuff like:
1x Casetech 1018 case
as many fans as you need to keep it cool
(but for each fan there should be a redundant replacement mounted already, jumping in if its active brother fails)
2x Enermax (or similare) PSU, 360W (one as spare-part)
2-3x HDD (the larger the better)
1x RAID controller (you might consider one with onboard-RAM for cache)
2x HDD for backup purposes
1x streamer (maybe)
Whether to use IDE (cheap) or SCSI RAID (very expensive) I do not know. I would assume, two very fast (Western Digital Special Edition or IBM) drives should suffice but check that they have a large cache (8MB), better get a RAID controller that can have RAM mounted (64MB to 128MB should be fine).
You should take away all possibilities for others to access the system. No VGA, no keyboard, no mouse. Make sure to remove the external USB/Firewire/Audio ports (if "home-brew") (i.e. ot connecting them to the mainboard).
Only admin should be able to connect.
You might want to consider an LCD built-in, that gives the most important status info, for hardware and software.
As OS go for OpenBSD or similare secure.
Last but not least: Todays systems heat up ! Especially if you'd go for 10.000rpm SCSI drives.
And, sarcastically, adding more fans to cool the system down add redundant air-supply for any fire.
As soon (does not happen often but considering it is
Ya... Support. ;)
-Jas
Hey, you should get one of the new Mac G5's... the cheapest one would only take up half of your budget. Are you in high school? I know appearances are everything in high school - you can't let other clubs have a better looking computer than yours. And one of the advantages to being a Mac is no one really uses them, so you'd have less people trying to screw with your stuff (security through obscurity, right?). And don't forget how fast it is running Photoshop... you just can't get that kind of performance from a PC.
Uh, what do you mean you're not running Photoshop?
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
I recently arranged for a server for our student organization (computer engineers mostly) because the university unices were quite slow and small harddrives.
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 Antec case that should be sufficient in the future too (and the PSU is quite reliable)
its connected at 100mbps to the university network.
Yes - its single CPU but about the fastest we had money for, RAM was important since we do alot of X11-forwarding aswell as ssh-connections with all kinds of stuff running in the background. www with dynamic pages and databases etc (nothing big yet but its growing).
currently its been in "production usage" for alittle over 100 days and working great (running a modified version of RH 7.3). The hardware isnt server grade but Intel motherboard and Kingston RAM along with a shitload of fans should make it stable enough for the time being. Its been fast enough.
I dont think you need to be afraid of not enough power - personally i'd rather use the leftover money for backup (which we dont have currently, and yes - i keep living in fear though i backup the system itself and keep reminding users that their stuff IS NOT BACKED UP) and/or future upgrades(or possible hw-breakdown) depending on how the money is supposed to be spent.
I'd also go ahead and note that harddrive speed wont be an issue as long as your connection speed is 100mbps or less, very few tasks need fast harddrives on a server of this kind.
Hope that helps, my email is in my profile is you want to ask more.
I would suggest buying a used Mac G3 Blue+White, get one with the Adaptec Ultra2Wide SCSI card. The 450MHz model was the last in it's line, so it has all the revisions, etc.
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.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
My high school's first web/email server was a 166 MHz Cyrix 6x86 (or whatever they called the Cyrix Pentium-alike)
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.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It's very pleasant to see people looking out for one another. And, in reality, no matter what the CPU speed is, I'm sure the questioner will have figured out by now from the responses posted ("get a Commodore 64, anything else is overkill!") that it'll be quite adequate for the task at hand.
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.
not even reading the rest of the comments i would say that for handling email/webpages for 500, your greatest botlenecks are bandwidth followed by hard drive space. So any PIII 1G would do it, for disk space, think about the quota you want to give each person in email+webspace? 100M? 500x100M = 50G, as for fast disks, no great need for that (again, your main limit will be bandwidth) if you are serious about not loosing data, use ide raid 1. (of course, everything is assuming you use linux/bsd)
I'm trying to get modded "Interesting Flamebait Informative and Insightful Redundant Troll" *-* Please Help *-*
I say cut it back some like the others but still go all out. I only have 50 email users but we're running spamassassin and virus scanning along with mailing lists. When someone sends an email to all of our employees, the load average can hit 4.5 or so. This machine is a PIII 750 with 512MB ram.
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 administrative tasks.
Anyway, bottom line, go for it, the school will have something that runs for a very long time and will have room to grow into more and more duties.
A 166 MHz Cyrix Pentium-alike did just fine for my school's computer club serving Q1 and Q2, and it was also the school's web server/mail server. Remember, dedicated servers don't need to have all that video rendering horsepower.
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.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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
Since you want to run serveral services on this machine I'd suggest using FreeBSD and using jails to have every kind of service (mail / web / db / dns.. whatever) running in its own environment.
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.
-- I love the smell of Blue Screens in the morning.
BTW, anything more than an Intellivision running IntyOS on a dual cassette drive is completely overkill.
Reign it in a bit there buddy. * 8-bit hardware has all the horsepower you need.
You need
C64 Computer with diskdrive
Contiki Web Server
C64 Ethernet Card
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
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
What kind of High-School club has 250 members, 100 of which really want to put up web-pages and has that kind of left-over budget for getting a computer?
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.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Buy a used Cobalt RAQ on ebay. Perfect for this application - provides an easy to use interface for email/web hosting and will handle your users no problem. Runs on linux so you can install anything additional you need. Should be able to get one for under $500. Buy two if you need fault tolerance or buy the 3i and get RAID support out of the box. Excellent units and cheap.
-Kevin
As for the rest of your comments, i doubt the OP needs 5 9's. More like one 9 and a 5 - it's just an HS club, not Wall Street. I'd place policy as teh most important part of the deal. The OP needs to make sure he isn't responsible for the actions of the users, make sure if anyone is responsible, it is the school. Don't get in RIAA/MPAA hell just b/c your server ends up serving contraband.
Go to HP's website and get yourself a new Proliant DL320 G2 1U rack server. All you really need for your application is single CPU anyway and this box has built-in IDE ATA/100 RAID1.
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 housing department. It retails for $2079, but I got mine for just under $1800 off the state and local govt discount contract. Use that other $2200 to buy a year's worth of RoadRunner business-class (static ip addr) cablemodem service. You don't even need to buy a router or firewall, since the dual nics in this box plus being Linux, you'll already have that.
Be sure to download and install the "hpasm" rpm for RedHat Linux on this box off HP's support website so it'll spin the DL320 G2's fans down to low speed, otherwise they'll run full blast by default and sounds like jet turbines.
As others have said, the hardware you have in mind is *way* overkill. Any old Pentium II would be fine. In fact a Pentium I would probably be fine too. Just get good quality hardware that won't let you down (particularly the power supply), a good backup system like a tape drive, and a good UPS system to protect it all.
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 into a used/refurbished server from IBM or Dell. Dell has had some incredibly cheap deals on new servers lately. I'd probably go for one of those, as cheap as possible, but splurge on backup and UPS. RAID might be a good idea too. Still -- you're probably talking about less than a grand.
Someone mentioned Sun -- that would be fine, but chances are you're already more familiar with Linux. And Sun parts and accessories are more expensive, new or used, even if the boxes aren't.
Speaking of reliability, have you considered software? Of course any Linux distribution would do, but you're going to have to do a lot of configuring, plugging security holes, etc. So why not start with a distribution that's tailor-made for your needs, set up for exactly the things you want to do, and is proven reliable? Why not use something where someone else has already figured out and fixed all the gotchas?
Try SME Server. It's a Redhat-based system designed exactly for what you want to do -- a router, firewall, mail server, and web server with virtual hosting capability. It's already configured for all this. All you have to do is load it. Administration is via web interface. There's plenty of documentation on the e-smith site, and good community support too.
The closest thing to SME Server is a Cobalt Qube/RaQ. However, SME Server can be loaded on any Pentium class machine. It's also a full Redhat system with command line access and all the Redhat tools. So you can add whatever else you might need later, just like any other Redhat box.
Finally, a Qube Professional with a tape backup and UPS might be a fun toy, but a conventional Intel box with SME server is a more capable, flexible, and cheaper solution.
a power outage on RAID is no different than a power outage on a single disk fs
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 array fails. Then, they invariably say "I didn't need backups, because I had RAID!"
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Dell has a pretty good deal on a computer that would already be overkill :P
The PowerEdge 500SC has a 1.2GHz Celeron processor, 128MB 133MHz ECC SDRAM, a 20GB hard drive which you might want to use in conjunction with a PCI RAID card, and a builtin ethernet controller.. all for $499 as advertised in PC Mag
Please god no!
/etc/ have big "Don't touch these!" comments in them, and it's a weird setup anyway.
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 curve being too steep.
-- You ain't seen me, right?
Here's what I'd buy:
- 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.
As stated many times abover, the processing power you have put in us way over the top. Think about the bandwidth. What are you ging to have to the net? 1 Mbit/sec? 5? A Scsi disk can deliver 500 Mbit/sec. Most of the web pages are static, so it is just scrape it off the oxide and send it down the link. Yes, there are some dynamic ones: how much processing is needed for them (run a test - I bet it isn't much)?.
Ram - well, you need at least 1/2 Gb, and the extra is not much.
Disks: you have put in 3 in a Raid 5. Do you really need that much space? 70 Gb disk for 250 users gives about 250Mb each - surely enough for email plus personal pages - most web accounts give 10Mb for personal pages, and few user fill them (does any body have experience with an ISP to comment on that?) And if your mail spool is in the 100Mb class, you are in trouble - or you exchange a lot of porn. I would have thoughtn2 disks in Raid 1 would do. And the only reason to go scsi is the greater reliability: Scsi gets 5 years warranty, IDE 1 - and that reflects in the build. And you can do soft raid, too, rather than spend money on a raid controller. On a sustem we built recenmtlyu, soft raid-1 was faster than hard raid, because of using a 32bit Scsi controller on a 64-bit busa.
Go for reliability. You want to leave a system that, once set up, runs forever. Overspec your PSU - PSUs like running about 50% load (but not too much - they don't like 10% load). Definitely overspec your fans - a $10 fan can quadruple the life of several $200 disks. Don't buy the cheapest kit in sight - try and get something with a bit more reliability built into the connectors etc. And, as already posted, have a backup solution as well as Raid. Put effort into making the backup process easy, and test and document the restore process (rember, it is probably your successor who will have to do it).
And spend any left-over money on bandwidth. That is what the net is about - bandwidth, not mips. Mips are a means to an end in web servers, and an excess is just wasted.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
"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."
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 as light as you want it to be too.
First: Stop bitching at this kid about RAID.
/everything/ in his or her user folder. I /am/ saying that the most important files should be on a CD or something in the user's desk drawer. It's only good backup practice.
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
My dual shiny, copper discs.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
The admin works for the user. The user does not work for the admin. If the school burns to the ground and all the data is lost, the users should complain. Loudly.
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 uses to help the user manage his bits.
If a server administrator starts confusing his job with "the guy who takes care of the computer", he's probably the kind of guy would suck at any job. "I'm the guy who takes care of the hammer," says the carpenter. "I'm just the guy who takes care of the car," says the taxi driver. "I'm just the guy who approves posts," says the slashdot editor.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Oh, I totally agree. I just wanted to point out that users should know how important it is to back up their important data. Perhaps I overemphasized that a little. My bad. :-)
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
I agree with your post, but tape is too much hassle and space to use.
Buy a DVD writer, ($300), a stack of DVD-r's and you can do weekly backups for ~$5.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
backup built-in and a laptop would give you plenty of computer to handle 250 email and 100 websites. You will have to sit down and do some capacity planning. How many emails do you expect to be sent and received each day? How many web hits/day? You should be able to find an inexpensive laptop to run your servers. Make sure it has USB ports and maybe even buy a backup laptop just in case. Then you can expand as you need to via USB devices. Now if you expect to stream audio/video your needs would differ.
You really need to define how the system will be used before you go spend any money. Maybe come up with 3 different scenarios: Light use, medium use and heavy use and see where that takes you.
http://tinyurl.com/3t236
I started a web hosting company several years ago with two 486DX-33s w/32Megs of RAM for DNS servers, and an AMD K6-233 system with 128Megs of RAM for the HTTP/Sendmail server that also ran MySQL.
The system had PHP installed as well, and served several phpBB boards. One of which received over a million hits a month, and dished out several GB of data a month.
I never had any issues with system performance, and my servers took a serious beating every single day of their life.
How about by investing in TWO lower spec systems rather than one, and CLUSTERING them.
;-)]
Active-Passive Cluster
or
Active-Active Cluster
If its a Windows Server (Win2kAS not necassary) environment, Legato's Co-Standby Server software, is pretty reliable, but LEGALLY the cost is the Issue.
The reason I mentioned Co-Standby server is, cause its only wants the OS to be be identical, Win2k Server X2 or Win2kAD X2, unlike Windows Advanced Server where it NEEDS identical OSes & hardware to cluster.
Two systems
P4 1.7 Ghz
256 MB RAM
(RAID)
Still I'd say if you can do the Active-Passive or even Active-Active Cluster with Linux go for it, might even come in handy for some load balancing.
[Note to Self: Go research on Linux Clustering
I agree with your gentoo/debian point of view, but Debian's install (from what I recall) was a LOT more intensive and didn't net many benefits over Gentoo.
Also, I found apt-get very confusing, but emerge makes a LOT of sense to me. Just a personal opinion.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
This is way overkill. I have a highschool environment with about 650 kids (900 this september) and 75 staff or so. We use a Compaq Proliant 3000 (PII 600Mhz/1.25GB RAM/73GB RAID1) for our file server and PDC (runs NT4). This machine gets hit pretty hard. CPU usage is around 2%. I use a Proliant 1600 (PII 450Mhz/1GB RAM/36GB RAID1) for Exchange 5.5 email (NT4). Processor usage is about 5%. Email is pretty popular at the school, and Exchange is a procesor hog. I also have an IBM eServer with a PIII 1.0Ghz (or thereabouts) 1GB of RAM, and a 73GB RAID5 for web. This thing is mostly dynamic content, running ASP.Net and Windows 2000. Chip usage is around 7%. I could easily combine all of this onto the Proliant 1600, and not have to worry about system resources. Skip that machine you've got thought up. Get yourself a PIII 1.3Ghz/1Gb RAM/36GB RAID1 box, from Dell or Compaq with the educational discount. Next, pick up a good backup solution - as others have said, this si going to set you back a bunch. Don't cut corners here, though. A DLT drive is going to be several thousand dollars, alone. DLT tapes aren't cheap either. A UPS isn't mandatory for a computer club, but it's definetely a good idea. Finally, learn to do this right before you do it - based on your hardware purchasing thoughts, you have no idea.
--Brian Desmond