thanks for the reply.... comments inline....
> On 1 Aug 2006, at 05:08, Dennis McLeod wrote: >> I'm curious what hardware you build on. Do you buy Dell, HP, build >> your >> own, or do something else? > > I'd go with a Dell SC1425. Get them to put in 2 80Gb SATA drives and > buy an Adaptec RAID card so you can RAID1 them for a bit of data > security. Sure, you could build it cheaper if you really tried, but > is it worth it? They only cost ~£600 for what you'll need. > > Where you'll really save money is by buying RAM from Crucial instead > of Dell. For what Dell charge for an extra 512Mb you can get 2Gb from > Crucial. > Great Tip, Thanks. I'll have a look at this cause I have 60 or so Dell workstations with only 256M's on XP..... >> What level of hardware would you use for an email only server with >> this >> number of accounts? > > SC1425, 512Mb RAM, 2 RAID1 80Gb SATA drives. > > Actually, I use a Xen VM with 512Mb RAM sitting on top of an SC1425 > with 2Gb RAM and 2 RAID1 SATA drives which uses a hub-and-spoke mail > delivery model to push mail to the servers which host the domains, > but the idea is the same :) > I've been foillowing XEN, and am very interested in this setup. I am on the Fedora XEN mailing list, and see some interesting questions. Do you use Xen built on Gentoo? > Xen allows me to have separate SMTP, MX, NS etc servers within one > physical host, each with a dedicated RAM allocation. Virtualisation > is a great word to chuck at management and if you do a little reading > you can get a CPU that'll let you run unmodified Windows VMs on top > of your Xen install which can be handy in a mixed environment. > >> What if you added print and file services? > > Stick in a bit more RAM and a second processor and you'll be fine. > Ideally you want a second server for file services, and printers > which have their own network interface but money might not stretch > that far. > A second server MIGHT be possible in the future.... >> What do you use for backup? > > A separate server with RAID5 and huge hard drives, only accessible > from a dedicated network -- not the same one that everyone else is > connected to! Because it'll only be accessed when the backups are > happening, these drives are bought for size rather than speed to save > money. > > Use rsnapshot. It's easy to setup and only saves the change deltas so > takes up much less space. > I'll have to start reading > Have you thought about completely outsourcing your mail system > instead of keeping it with the website provider? It's probably be > cheaper and easier in the long run. > > Cheers, > Craig > -- > No long-term contracts, no complicated signup forms, no hidden costs. > Xeriom 2.0: Web hosting made easy. Coming soon! http://xeriom.net/ > > > > -- > [email protected] mailing list > > -- [email protected] mailing list
