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?

Comments

Re:bandwidth

[CounterZer0]

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.

OVERKILL

[ColaMan]

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.

Don't need much.

[Andy Dodd]

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.)