Date: Sat, 05 Jan 2002 16:44:53 -0700 From: Chris Fedde <chris@fedde.littleton.co.us> To: Matthew Graybosch <matthew@starbreaker.net> Cc: "J.S." <johann@broadpark.no>, FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Parts I recommend (formerly "Workstation and server-market") Message-ID: <200201052344.g05Nirx97840@fedde.littleton.co.us> In-Reply-To: <20020105170230.636999bb.matthew@starbreaker.net>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Sat, 5 Jan 2002 17:02:30 -0500 Matthew Graybosch wrote:
+------------------
| > Where do I go for the most reasonable, well-equipped and good-looking
| > workstations and servers, which are decently compatible with FreeBSD?
| >
| > I thought I'd go and look a bit further than dell.com -- I'm also a bit
| > interested in building my own boxen, where do I go for that?
|
| Name-brand OEMs build their machines to run Windows. Unix compatibility is
| incidental to most of them, despite IBM pushing Linux on its servers.
| Basically, any machine that can run Linux can probably run FreeBSD just as
| well. Here are the parts I recommend (also the parts I used)
+------------------
I like to pick and choose my own parts too. Generally staying away from OEM
components is a good idea.
+------------------
| --AMD Athlon CPU. A single 1 GHz CPU is adequate for a workstation unless
| you're doing heavy 3D graphics work. If you are, then consider a pair of
| Athlon MP CPUs and build an SMP rig (you'll need a custom kernel for SMP so
| RTFM). For a server, you'll almost definitely want SMP.
+------------------
I guess that a heavy Database server might benefit from the extra punch
from dual CPU but almost any other server these days does not have much on
it's mind except IO. So it's hard to make generic statements about servers
that mean much. Most of my recent commercial experiences have used a
farming approach.
+------------------
| any problems with the DFI board I installed 18 months ago. For SMP using
| Athlon, I think your choices are limited to Tyan boards. Check Tom's
| Hardware for further info.
+------------------
I'll second the recommendation for Tom' Hardware. Great site for comparison
info.
+------------------
| --For a workstation or a server, you should have at least a 17-inch display.
| 19-inch is preferable, and if you can afford a 21-inch display then GO FOR
| IT!
+------------------
Lots of desk top space is important. If you are a real geek then
go for two video cards and two monitors. Get Xinarama runing and
then write an article telling us how you did it. Big monitors on
servers are a waste. If you are sitting in front of it it it's
not a server. Don't run xwindows on a server.
+------------------
| --Video cards... Hmmm... This one's kinda iffy. If 3Dfx was still in
| business I'd say that no one do voodoo like they do, and heartily recommend
| them. I loved my Voodoo3 adaptor until I screwed it up and had to replace
| it. These days, the major video card people for Linux and FreeBSD seem to be
| ATI, Matrox, and nVidia. I'm using a Hercules card based on nVidia's
| GeForce2 MX chipset, for which XFree86 provides 2D acceleration. If you need
| 3D acceleration as well, then you should probably get an ATI card, or try to
| find a 3Dfx Voodoo card.
+------------------
Most any modern video card is enough for XF86. I've always favored
the matrox cards but any modern card with 8Meg video ram will give
you high enough resolution and lots of color depth. XF86 does
not take much advantage of all the fancy graphics accelerator
features. Check the XFree86 web site and put the high end graphics
card into your windows gaming box.
+------------------
| --Disk space? The more the merrier. Especially for a server, and especially
| if you're doing a http/ftp server or running an RDBMS. I recommend a bare
| minimum of a 7200RM disk with 20GB capacity. For a workstation, you can
| probably get away with ATA100 disks, but with a server you need SCSI or a
| RAID configuration.
+------------------
Agreed, but get two big disks for a worksation. Use one as the
primary disk with / /usr /var and /home on it. Put swap on both
disks. make the remainder of the second disk into one or two large
partitions and use it for backup by dumping to disk using dump(8).
Forget about backup devices. They are slow and failure prone. If
you need off site storage get a removable disk drive tray for the
second drive and swap it out once in a while. Or even copy the
dump files over a lan to the big disk in your other computer :-).
If you need archive files for your accountant then cdrw is the best
approach for that but they are too small and slow for daily backups.
--
Chris Fedde
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200201052344.g05Nirx97840>