Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 03:57:17 +0300 From: "ANdrei" <lists@hausro.de> To: <freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: building an old-hardware server Message-ID: <049d01c6c005$dfee6570$857ba8c0@Rage> References: <200607201318.k6KDIOKH092991@lurza.secnetix.de>
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been searching the archives and reading articles the whole day, but still want to get some opinions (sorry for the long post, I want to detail everything in one mail, hope someone fins the patience to read through it quickly and give some advice): am building a webserver, which will also do some basic file serving in the LAN and have a MySQL database running... nothing too fancy, but the budget is 0$, so only recycled HW can be used... of course I want it to run as fast as possible, but more important: reliable. Will put 6.1-Release on it. here is what I got: ASUS P2B-DS Dual Processor Slot1 motherboard with Adaptec SCSI (FAST, WIDE and Ultra) onboard 384MB PC-100 SDRAM 2xIntel PII 350MHz CPU (100MHz FSB) Teac 32x SCSI CDROM Panasonic 8x IDE CDROM Inno3D S3 Savage4 extreme 32MB AGP graphic card 3Com 3C905B-TX Fast Ethernet XL 10/100 NIC I cannot decide on the HDD: the board supports UDMA33 for IDE and Fast/Wide/Ultra for SCSI (but I have only fast/SCSI-2 HDD anyway). My options are: -one 15GB Maxtor IDE (or some 20GB Fujitsu IDE, but I had some of them fail, so I'd avoid them) with UDMA if I can get it for free (not 100%) -one or two 4.3GB Fujitsu IDE with UDMA -alot of small (around 1GB) IDE hard drives -a few identical SCSI-2 (10Mbps) 5400rpm hard drives, each 2GB -2 non-identical SCSI-2 7200rpm hard drives (1GB and 2GB) I think 4-6 disks fit in my case. As my processors are not so fast, I'd like to have fastest disk access with minimum CPU load (ideal case, right? :). What would get me best results: SCSI or IDE (will the IDE be faster than my 7200rpm or 5400rpm SCSI?). Should I consider doing software RAID, will I see any speed improvement? I expect around 10-20 users doing random things on this server, not too heavy though, no GUI for them. I was thinking about the 7200rpm SCSI drives for the system and root, a RAID for the home/database (minimum 2GB should be enough for this, SCSI or IDE?) and 4GB (or more) IDE for space/builds/ports/logs etc... Any suggestions are welcome, I have never tried to build such a "recycled" system from so many smaller harddrives, so this is my main dilemma. About the hardware I already have: would one 600MHz PIII be faster, on this board or another (choices are Gigabyte GA-BX2000 with Intel 440BX chipset, supports PC-133 RAM - or Fujitsu-Siemens D1107 - Intel 443BX 100Mhz bus)? I considered the 2x350MHz to be faster in SMP for the variety of tasks this system will do, and I can upgrade at some moment... And I also have SCSI support on this board. Is the RAM too much on the minimum side? Have little experience with SMP systems, but more SDRAMs are hard to find... Any issues with the S3 Savage4 AGP cards? They tend to be slow, but I think for this system this won't be the bottleneck, as the Mobo supports AGP2x and the card is 4x already... I have considered the NIC to be important here. I've read through hundreds of articles, and the 3C905B seems to be quite fast and low on CPU load. Other alternatives were Kingston KNE110TX (seems to have some bugs according to the dc man page), D-Link DFE-530TX (rhine based, also buggy according to man page AND D-Link="let it be" according to users), some Davicom DM9102AF based cards (seem ok, but more on the low quality end) and the "loved" RTL8139C/D ones (buggy, right?). I don't expect sustained heavy traffic, but peaks... Any feedback is welcome, on the list or on my email, as I am in a hurry with putting the machine to work and cannot take my time and test all possible configurations... ANdrei http://students.oamk.fi/~t6ruan00/ ------ Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level then beat you with experience...
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