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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?
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.
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
RAID5 is good for redundancy, 1gb of RAM is cheap, but Dual P4's is a waste of money for that setup.
I totally agree, go with a hyperthreading processor to help simulate multiple processors, but stick with a single processor solution. If you are supporting that many individuals, you also may want to consider a backup solution, and back up all of the e-mail and web data on a regular (weekly) basis. For what you are doing, you might get by with an external firewire or USB2 hard drive that you connect once a week and start a copying script before you leave friday night.
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
I agree. The mail-mailweb server is a p-pro 200 with 256mb ram and a Raid 5 SCSI Wide with some SERIOUSLY old drives. Performance is ok with about 100 users all going through the web interface.
This is a school server. Buying parts requires them to think and learn more about the computer and it's parts than buying a ready built one. Which is a good thing.
In general, you are right tho. Dell makes excellent servers. It just doesn't fit the bill in this one.
the pun is mightier than the sword
They're called Xeons.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Yes, I totally agree - a box I set up serves 2000 hits an hour across a LAN/WAN, every hit being to a PHP page using a MySQL database; the same box is also a Squid proxy, with usage peaking at 10,000 requests per hour. That server is a single 2GHz PIII with 256Mb RAM.
Yeah, it could probably do with a bit more RAM, but speed-wise it's coping very well.
So I guess I imagined the servers at my company? 4-way P4 Xeons?