Calling All Techies....what do you think?

[SoopaStar]

A friend of mine is giving me free reign of his credit cards (and no, it will not be an early Christmas for anyone...so don't ask http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/wink.gif )to build him a linux server that he plans to run as a web server and telnet talker/mudd box. He will be co-locating this box at an ISP (although I am telling him to get DSL and do it himself). He is starting me off with $1500 to get the basics down. I am going to buy it in pieces and I need some advice. For cost purposes (biggest bang for the buck) I was going to go with either an Athlon T-bird or Athlon 950. I am going to use an Abit KA7 motherboard (I have the KA7-100 and LOVE it). I am going to give it some Crucial PC133 memory with either one or two sticks of 256 meg 'almost top of the line' type. Plan on using the Western Digital 10,000 RPM SCSI2 drives (two or three 9.1 gb) and a SCSI Cdrom (prolly 24xn or faster...nto really important).
I need to know what you all think of this setup. He is not a hardware guy really, just wants a nice server setup. I was thinking abotu going with a dual Xeon system using the PIII 500 1 or 2 mb cache Xeons. But, for the price...that just doesn't seem to be a good idea. What do you all think? The motherboard (supermicro) woudl cost about $290-300, and the Xeon I think was $700 or so...maybe more. Also, I can't decide on a SCSI card. I want a nice performer--should I just go with the Adaptec SCSI2 2940 card? And for the nic--should I just use a 3Com 3c905TX 10/100? Video card isn't important since it will be sitting as a box.
Just wanted advice from some people who may have done this already. Oh, it will all be going in a SuperMicro SC760a case with all the fans and other goodies. It comes with a 300 watt power supply, but I plan on upgrading that to at least a 400 watt.
Thanks muchly,
Paul

[BBA]

Hmmm.....

Athlon/T-Bird would not be my first choice.

For the most bang for the buck, get a dual CPU rig, say 700-800MHz. Duals multitask much better, and no one single internet server task is ever gonna need 900MHz or better raw cycles in one thread.

Look at this board: ASUS Dual FC-PGA (http://www.asus.com.tw/products/Motherboard/pentiumpro/cur-dls/feature.html)

And get at least 256-512M ram and SCSI drives.

I think you can do it for $1500 base cpu.

[This message has been edited by BBA (edited 07-19-2000).]

[SoopaStar]

Thanks for the reply! Do you think I should look at the PIII Xeons or just the regular PIII's?

Paul

EDIT: I can't find that motherboard on Pricewatch. Is it out yet? Or, what do you think the price will be?

[This message has been edited by SoopaStar (edited 07-19-2000).]

[BBA]

I think it will be in the $300-$350 range.

Add 2 P3 700's at $250ea, $500 for RAMand $200-$300 for an U2W SCSI drive...

Pretty close to $1500.

I don't know when the board is officially available...soon.

[SoopaStar]

Motherboard:
SuperMicro SUPER 370DL3 $330
Pentium III 850 $450
Crucial Memory 256 MB $320
Crucial Memory 256 MB $320
Western Digital 18 GB SCSI2 10000 RPM $245
CD Rom SCSI $50
SuperMicro SC760a (300 watt) $140
Adaptec 2940 $180
Video Card $45
Processor Fan(golden orb) $17
Case (Fan (sunon - $9 each) $27

Total Damage to Credit Cards $2,124

Little more than he wanted to spend, but I think it will be nice. Is that SCSI card an okay one?

[SDT]

Is this a commercial enterprise? It sounds like one. What about Raid (software raid) for some redundancy? You may need to include some more scsi disks & cards if you need raid. I think that you will want a high speed tape backup device. Are you expecting lots of ip traffic... a second nic may be in order!

[SoopaStar]

Its not for a corporation--just a guy wanting to host his own server, really. I will be adding a backup device and power-backup as well to the list later on. Not going to do a raid right now because 1) the data is not mission critical, so the use of a raid for mirroring the drive isn't a big deal. 2) don't need to combine all the drives into one big drive since it will be linux.
Right now he will only be getting one connection to the internet so all we need is one nic. If he gets the next-up package with the DSL he can have up to 16 IP's, so we may think of that next. However, the dsl is only as fast as 768k and the co-location only offered him 64k burst speeds. so, a 10/100 nick should be okay.
Paul