Liquid Cooled Terminal Server Lets start with the specs: Msi K7D-Master-L Motherboard. Onboard 10/100 nic (for WAN) 2: 1GHZ AMD Athlon MP processors Copper shimmed Cold Spike All copper water blocks (avaliable from my websight www.hasty-solutions.com) 3 Enermax Ultra Cool temperature controlled fans. 7" x 12" transmission oil cooler 1 qt coolant with water wetter coolant pump (all coolant components are internaly plumbed and contained). 512 MB DDR 266 CL 2 Samsung ram Usb 2.0 Usb 1.1 External Usb 2.0 30G ibm backup hard drive. Broadcom bcm5701 64 bit 66 mhz copper gigabit nic (for terminals usning eepro100 nics) Intel SRCU32 2 channel u160 64 bit 66 mhz raid controller w/ 256 MB pc-133 CL 2 micron/crucial ram 6+1 Raid 5 Seagate cheta 10k rpm u160 4 MB cashe SCSI Drives, in removable sca drive trays. DVD-rom Sony CDRW 24X Int zip 250 1.44 Floppy Soundblaster Live ATI Rage 128 Pro 32 MB 21" ncd monitor ATX Full Tower case with red racing stripes. 350 Watt ATX Pentium 4/AMD approved powersupply.
The only trouble I have found is the smp kernel and usb, particuarly one hp officejet G85 usb device, locks it up even beond the help the the alt sysreq routieen. Some simple drive performance stats of the raid 5 array for you [root@h2o brent]# hdparm -t /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.22 seconds = 52.46 MB/sec [root@h2o brent]# hdparm -T /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.66 seconds =254.94 MB/sec As you can see by the cashe reads I am getting pretty good use of the extra bandwidth the 64 bit 66 mhz pci slots this particular motherboard has avaliable. You might want to consider somthing similar for your disk I/O intense servers. If you know of any other decent benchmarks that can be run on mdk 9.0, let me know about them and I will be glad to share results. A Note to bear in mind about SMP, when for whatever reason you have a process run away and max tax your processor rather than bringing a whole uni-processor machine to its knees. With smp you end up with one cpu stressing at 100+% load, while the other is availiable to respond to user demands, such as killing the runaway process. and yes my intel raid controller under mandrake hot swaps the sca drives just fine. > *** Sent this already, doesn't seem to have arrived so I'm sending it again > *** > > Hi guys, > > I just got something of a promotion and I've been asked to change the > network over to hardware/software/OS over to something more professional. > > my plans are: > > - Mandrake Linux on all box's that will take it. (I thought about a unix > variant (Solaris specifically), but I'm now more familiar with Linux, and > most familiar with Mandrake. plus I decided to support the movement :-) > - Rack mount servers with Hotswap SCSI UW harddisks, two per box setup to > mirror. (speed not that important, at least initially.) > - Digital switch for single monitor/keyboard/mouse per rack tower. > - Mail (postfix, amavisd-new, spamassasin), Web (apache extranet), DNS > (DynDNS (if I can figure out how to change over from Bind9.x)) servers. > - Master router/firewall, preferably hardware, but linux box if easier. > must be able to handle NAT and straight routing at the same time on > different interfaces. and must be able to handly two NET connections and > switch between the two if one goes down. (say for example two ADSL > connections, or a T1 and a backup ADSL.) For your in house network go gigabit over copper, you will appriciate the significant performance increase, and the cost has become more and more negligable between quality 10/100 nics and the newer 10/100/1000 nics. Just an investment inthe future. > > > My Questions are: > > 1. SCSI controllers/drives and hotswap... can linux handle hotswapping? And > whats the best controller cards to use? I have heard many a complaint about > Adaptec cards and the like.. whats the best supported trouble free card? The intel card I am using seems to be doing quite well, though it would be nice to do some thourough benchmarking to do some real world comparisons. > > 2. Hardware router/firewall setup, anyone have any suggetions here??? a box > capable of handling multiple connections and offer NAT AND routing to > different interfaces on the back of the unit? > > 3. Whats the best prefab backup system for linux box's??? (don't tell me > its tar.. I was hoping for something more inclusive). are you asking about network backup utilitys? Or will drakebackup work (simple lightweight and GPL)? > 4. DYNDNS. I have working BIND9 installs, and I am not used to Dyndns, but > the config pages on Bernsteins site read like gibberish to me, I want to > edit a config file or two like with BIND.. is there a way of doing that?? > > 5. Multiple CPU's, I was thinking of using Dual AMD CPU's on the mail and > web servers.. the mail and web will be doing all the mail and sites for > about 100 websites and is likely to have some high usage statictics as time > goes on.. Is this a good idea or should I just create multiple web/mail > servers and configure them via round robin or similiar?? > > Any hardware tips, suggestions, flames etc about config and stuff from > those of you using this stuff would be most appreciated. > > > kindest regards > > Frank -- 11:09pm up 13 min, 3 users, load average: 0.08, 0.22, 0.19
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