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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?
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.
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!