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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?
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.
As far as the number of people that box can support - that's absolutely insane, unless you get hundreds of thousands of hits per minute on your websites, and they are all hitting some kind of back end database. RAID5 is good for redundancy, 1gb of RAM is cheap, but Dual P4's is a waste of money for that setup.
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.
Here's an example of what I'm talking about: A Dell server, 650Mhz P3, 256 megs RAM, 18 gigs RAID. The thing is only $399 with 12 hours left to go in the bidding. And if you need it, you can even add another processor later. But I doubt that you will need it soon.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
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.
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
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 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?
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.
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.