[techtalk] New RH system

[BobTFish]

At 21:08 22/05/00, A. Morner wrote:
>Hi Folks..
>
>Brief intro:  Tech Coordinator of a small accounting firm in NH, some
>experience in Linux, mostly user-end,  but still learning as I go along..
>
>Background:  I've been asked to build a redhat box that will serve as our
>email, web and ftp server (among various other little tasks)..  We already
>have one server up and running RH 6.2 with a BP6 motherboard by Abit, only
>trouble being that the ATA/66 drives we put in, had to settle for 33.  Tried
>using Gentus, a highly plagarized version of Redhat put out by ABit, but
>something wasn't stable and I'm not LinuxLiterate enough yet to figure out
>what it was so we went back to RH.  I'm not certain with regards to the
>other components where to go from here..
>
>My question:  What would you folks recommend for an "ideal" server.  My boss
>wants me to use a dual-processor motherboard and it looks like that will
>have to be the BP6.

Hmm. I would *really* shy away from the BP6 if I was you. Some of them seem 
to work fine but other people have *major* problems getting them to be stable.

If you look on the linux kernel mailing list there are *lots* of people 
with problems with this board. (And I am told it isn't just linux related)

>My goals:  I want it fast, I want it stable, I want it easy to setup.  I
>want to put the system together and install with no glitches. My goal in
>this is not to learn how to recompile a kernel (I'm sure many of you are
>smirking saying "if you only knew how easy it was," but I've other things I
>need to learn first. (That can come later ;)

Ok, so you are serving email, web and ftp.. Pretty conflicting requirements..
Could you make a guess as to how much email you will move a day? And also 
number of ftp & web users. Also what sort of connection will this box have 
because a box in 100Mb/s switched network will come under a lot more strain 
than a box at the end of a 33.6K dial up :)

For the web end will you be serving static pages or running PHP3 or will 
you have a big fat SQL database going..

To put this into perspective... I have a server at home on a P100 running 
linux 2.0.36 providing ftp, web for the local users (only 4 of us) and also 
serving out mp3s (via samba& nfs) and a whole slew of other things.. It is 
connected to a 10Mb/s network and has no problem filling the network with 
packets.. even under heavy load.

BobTFish