Building a server?

[Allen]

Main uses:

Fileserver - lots of space, 1TB preferable
Printserver
Game/TS server possibility - not 24x7 but able to run them temporarily
Web hosting - if using a static IP
Firewall and web server - other computers connect to the server to connect to the interweb
And as an added extra, DNS - I know what it is, but don't quite fully understand how to do it, but people have talked about including it on their servers

Hardware:

Single HDD's or RAID? IDE or SCSI?
Mobo - haven't a clue
CPU - haven't a clue

Basically as cheap as possible (between £500-1000). Not worried about case or other peripherals, just the internals. Been asked to spec something up, but am also interested myself, could be a good thing to get going as I want to do MCSA/MCSE in the near future, so actually doing some of it myself could really help.

Anything else I'd need to know?

[Moby-Dick]

that pretty doable on that sort of budget

what sort of games ( This woudl make quite a difference as some game servers are more resource hungry than others )

90% of that coudl be done by a nice clarkconnect box , which has the advantage of being free software wise then get another low (ish ) cost windows box to run your game/TS server

but seeing as you are wanting to go down the MS cerification trial , that not going to be much help there !

I personally bought myself a "proper" server ( old Compaq proliant 6500 ) - its a quad CPU beast with 2.5 Gb of memory and 5 !18Gb hard drives - it cost me about £225 I think , with the change left over you could buy a SATA enclosure for that storage space

Windows 2003 server will do most of what you want out of the box ( including gateway stuff , but not nessesarily proxy server ( unless you botain a copy of ISA )

Local DNS is pretty straight forward and require if you want to run a test domain on your 2k3 box.

If its for someon else , then it changes things a little. Are they wanting it for home use ? or is someone livlyhood going to depend on it ? you have to consider reliability issues if its for more than home use.

personally I like to double up on as much as possible , dual CPU , multiple memory sticks , hard drives and power supplies will mean that even if one of them dies you can still get the server running ( albeit in a lower spec form )

SCSI is faster , but a lot more expensive , you wont get your storage in scsi for the budget you are looking at. you might want to do a SCSI boot drive with IDE storage though ?

it seems like S-ATA is hitting a nice middle ground with the raptor series getting some very nice speeds , but you can also get some nice big and slow drives for storage capacity.

hope this helps.

[Allen]

It definately does Moby, and thanks for the quick response!

I'd be interested to know where you got that server from, was it 2nd hand/refurbished?

I presume CS:S, CoD, BF etc, the main hosted online games. As I said, I don't think it would be run permanently, just as a temporary solution. Web hosting would be personal but well used, so 100% reliability is not as important as it's certainly not for commercial use.

The home usages would be the same reason why I might want one, file/print/mail/net server.

Am also thinking SCSI would be too much, but since I know nothing about hosting etc, I don't know how SATA drives would handle serving web files, probably a forum and TS all at once, with games sometimes being ran (I think to test it, play about with admin commands etc to learn or something like that).

Even though I'd like to use 2003 Server, I think the cost is too much, so would it be possible to stick with a (legal) copy of 2000 Pro? I don't know how much 2000 Server (if it exists) is, but if it's not a lot, that could be an option instead perhaps?

[Moby-Dick]

I dont think you can buy 2000 server any more , but sometimes kit is sold with a w2k server licence so thats covered

I got my box off ebay theres a couple of good sellers around , just dont pay too much for it.

What you really need is as much memory as you can cram into a box - that way you are not writing to disk so often , so the speed is less important.

IIRC BF1942 needed quite a beefy server for the dedicated , but I'll have a quick poke around and check.

if you dont mind re-installing quite often , you could look at one of the time limited versions of 2003 ( which might be more important to you for MCSE certification. ) I'm sure you can get 120 or 180 day versions for free.

TS server isn't very resource intensive IIRC. Serving a forum is a different matter - you'll be running some form of database , which might get quite busy , depeonding on how many projected users you have ( though I suspect bandwidth would be a problem long before the server was )

I'll have a quick peak on ebay and see if there is anything worth watching.

[Allen]

I wouldn't expect more than 100 people on the forums, it will be used privately. May seem a bit of a waste for a server, but he wants a fileserver and thought he could use it for the above functions to maximise it's use and learn a bit more.

I have ran a phpBB forum before and know about the bandwidth usage, but since it will be from his home connection (unlimited) I don't think it'll be a problem, especially as it won't get anywhere near the hits Hexus does! It really is a small project, so I'm not thinking too big.

Where would you get these time limited versions of 2003 Server from, and how legal is it to use them? Or can't you say on here?

I must say though, I would've preferred to have built it myself. It would benefit me and if I could find some bargains, I could maybe save money. I doubt I would be able to afford £500-1000 just for a server so I may need to be a bit more stringent with my budget, but I won't have the need for games/forums etc, just a little bit of hosting and file/print/mail/web serving.

[Moby-Dick]

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserv...e/default.mspx

totally legal

does phpBB use mySQL as well ?

if you have 100 people hitting that site at once then it'll hurt unless the home connectino has plenty of upstream bandwidth ?

looks like BF is quite heavy on CPU and memory and CS:S is less so
seeing as you are unlikely to be hosting 20 play games on a home connection you probably can live without something thats uber high speed , but multi thrreaded to be able to do lots of small tasks at once

[Moby-Dick]

how about this bad boy

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...778907950&rd=1

get another 2 Gb of memory for it and mod a nice little S-ATA array into it

[Moby-Dick]

or build something nice into this ?

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...774293084&rd=1

you shoudl be able to pick up a good old dual althoon motherboard for very little , with a couple of althlon MP's ( or mod regular ones )

nice S-ata raid controller ( or two )

pair of 10k raptors for OS and apps

big fat raid 5 array for data

[Rave]

My thoughts are:

1) you'll get nowhere near a 1TB at reasonable cost with SCSI. You could run a fast SCSI drive (or three) as boot drive and then some cheaper IDE/SATA drives as bulk storage. Four 250GB SATA drives in RAID5 would give you 750GB of storage with fairly decent speed and reliability.

2)CPU/Motherboard- as I understand it, very few game server clients are multithreaded, so you'd be better off with one or two fast processors rather than four slower ones a la Moby. If you want to use four procs you also require a full on Server OS since 2000 and XP Pro will only use two.

You could do worse than to look at an Athlon MP system. Later 760MPX chipset boards are stable and pretty bug free; and Athlon MP processors shouldn't be all that expensive. If you're happy to do a bit of modding then you can simply use XP processors. I took that route and lashed together a system with a modded XP2000 and Duron 1400, both running at 1.67GHz, on a Tyan Tiger MP with 256MB of RAM- in total all the parts cost me about £100 secondhand (+ case, PSU, CDRom, HD that I had lying around), and it's been crunching FAD 24/7 for the last couple of months with no issues at all.

[Moby-Dick]

That the game server clients are not multithreaded ( although I thought the linux ones where ? ) isn't an issue , but it means that while the game server is maxing out CPU 1 , cpus 2 , 3 and 4 are free to do their file serving , team speaking etc. Multi CPu is the way to go if you want to do lots of little things at once

if you dont have apps written for it ,then you are limited by the speed of each individual CPU , but I've not found that a problem yet ( althought I think a 900 Mhz Xeon might struggle with some of the game serving , depending on the number of players )

Ideally you might find an ebay bargain of a dual 1.13 Xeon setup with 2-3 Gb of Ram and 3 9 or 18 Gb drives - this woudl leave you with budget for the storage array.

[Allen]

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserv...e/default.mspx

totally legal

Wow, that's pretty impressive! But surely MS know that some people would use it and re-install every now and then for free?

Yes, phpBB used MySQL.

I'm liking the idea of dual Athlon MP's, as they seem to be the cheaper alternative, but I thought Intel's were better for non-gaming tasks?

I'll have to wait till I'm home to check on those eBay links, can't access eBay from work.

Rave, yeah, storage on SCSI isn't an option, I purely mentioned SCSI drives for OS as I'm unsure about SATA being fast enough for server usage, but as Moby pointed out, 10K raptors would do the job nicely.

Also, how can 4x250GB SATA drives in Raid 5 only give 750GB space? Sorry, don't know all the RAID types, so could someone educate me how the RAID 5 setup works pls?

Ta guys, appreciate it.

[Allen]

Ahh, also, on dual motherboards (an option I like for multitasking), do the CPU's not have to be exactly the same then? Rave mentions using an XP2000 and Duron 1400 together...

[Rave]

That the game server clients are not multithreaded ( although I thought the linux ones where ? ) isn't an issue , but it means that while the game server is maxing out CPU 1 , cpus 2 , 3 and 4 are free to do their file serving , team speaking etc. Multi CPu is the way to go if you want to do lots of little things at once

True. I reckon two will probably do him unless he's wanting to run the game, AND serve up lots of data, AND run the forum, AND run TS all at the same time.

Ideally you might find an ebay bargain of a dual 1.13 Xeon setup with 2-3 Gb of Ram and 3 9 or 18 Gb drives - this woudl leave you with budget for the storage array.

I still maintain that Athlon MPs are better bang for the buck- the trouble is that none of the big vendors (afaik) sold mainstream servers based around them, so ebay isn't overflowing with them like it is with old Proliants and IBM Netfinities. What's with the 256KB cache Xeons in your earlier link? You might as well just use P3s surely? Or were they an entry level processor to lower the cost of entry into Slot2?

Having said all that though, this looks like stonking bargain:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...779324436&rd=1

[Rave]

Ahh, also, on dual motherboards (an option I like for multitasking), do the CPU's not have to be exactly the same then? Rave mentions using an XP2000 and Duron 1400 together...

Well thanks to a lot of pinmodding (and tearing out of hear and swearing) they appear to be identical as far as the motherboard is concerned. It refused to post with two processors until I pinmodded them so that the voltage is the same. I never tried it, but apparently lots of dual boards (both Pentium and Athlon MP) will run with the processors at different speeds, I have actually seen this benchmarked on an Abit BP6. I think Pentium III systems got more and more fussy about mismatched processors as time went on.

[Moby-Dick]

True. I reckon two will probably do him unless he's wanting to run the game, AND serve up lots of data, AND run the forum, AND run TS all at the same time.

that what I though he was wanting to do - eith that or run something more up to date , but with a single quicki CPU , but where is the fun in that ?

I still maintain that Athlon MPs are better bang for the buck- the trouble is that none of the big vendors (afaik) sold mainstream servers based around them, so ebay isn't overflowing with them like it is with old Proliants and IBM Netfinities. What's with the 256KB cache Xeons in your earlier link? You might as well just use P3s surely? Or were they an entry level processor to lower the cost of entry into Slot2?

I agree , there wern't many SMP athlon boxes used as server , but I believe they did do quite well in the high level work station market ? I think the 256 cache chips where entry level IIRC

Having said all that though, this looks like stonking bargain:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...779324436&rd=1

it wants you to buy it....buy it and play with it.....

[Rave]

I'm liking the idea of dual Athlon MP's, as they seem to be the cheaper alternative, but I thought Intel's were better for non-gaming tasks?

Nope. I suppose the Xeons with monster caches (like 1mb or 2mb) could have been better in some specific instances, but all round the Athlon MP made dual P3s/Xeons look pretty sluggish when they came out. For a start they have DDR memory (and apparently a cleverer bus arrangement) so lots more bandwidth, and the Athlon was a touch faster than the p3 clock for clock anyway.

For quite a while the Tech Report website was hosted on an Athlon MP box, in fact they did an article on it I think. Can't find it though.

Also, how can 4x250GB SATA drives in Raid 5 only give 750GB space? Sorry, don't know all the RAID types, so could someone educate me how the RAID 5 setup works pls?

Well RAID5 works by using one of the disks in the array to store parity data, while the rest are striped. If one of the drives fails, you can rebuild the array with the parity data- although you'll need another identical(?) disc to get it going again. You need a minimum of three discs for RAID5, and you always lose the size of one disk. So say if you had 3x250 drives you'd end up with a 500GB array, if you had 5x250 you'd have a 1GB array. I'm not quite sure how you can store parity data for four drives on one disc, but you can apparently. So, basically, RAID5 becomes faster and better value per GB the more drives you add. The reason I suggested a four disc array is because 8-port RAID5 controllers are a lot more expensive than 4-port ones.