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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.
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
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 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.
$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.
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.
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
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
What type of downtime is acceptable?
I agree with you that if he's serious about running a server he should just go buy a used server.
But, unless he buys a used eMachine from a guy in a back of a van, I doubt the hardware is going to be the significant factor in his machine's availability. Some of the problems are going to be hardware related -- a UPS fails, or the server room air conditioning fails, or a network switch fails, or a land-line gets cut by a backhoe, or the janitor hits the machine hard with the floor buffer.
But common problems are often going to be soft failures -- your ISP changes your IP block and forgets to tell you, or the company providing you with DNS goes through its end-of-life death rattles, or your server room is scheduled to be rewired, or your leased line stops working and none of the three companies involved admits responsibility.
Of course, the good old-fashioned wet failures are probably going to be the most common on a club server admin'd by a rotating staff of part-time inexperienced admins. Someone discovers, after a kernel upgrade, that they forgot to compile in support for the off-the-wall filesystem some past admin stuck on a filesystem. Or, someone hoses the apache configuration, and can't fix the problem for two weeks. Or, some guy who had the root password for two weeks back three semesters ago installed an unpatched PHPnuke website, and now more scriptkiddies have accounts than regular users.
Servers are a pain in the ass. Dual hot-swappable power supplies are the final step in setting up a high-availabilty machine. They're also the cheapest part of the whole process.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
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