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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
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 :)
Using RAID, be it RAID 1 or 5, shouldn't really be a replacement for routine backups but rather a safeguard in case a drive does fail... though may be good enough to defer a purchase of a tape drive or a CD/DVD burner.
Dual P4's is definitely overkill... if you really want to go with dual processors, take a look at getting dual Socket 370 P3 Tualatin processors and a compatible motherboard. That should provide more than enough processing power for e-mail, mailing lists, DNS, FTP, file sharing, web and database serving, etc.
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
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!
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.
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.
$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.
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.
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.
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?
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