Need help setting up a new *old* server.

[PeGa!]

Hi all,

I'm setting up a "new" server, but in fact, is a P2 400 MHz, 128MB, and two ide disks, one is a 4.3gb WD Caviar, and the other is a 80.3 gb maxtor diamondmax plus 9.

The only choice installing an OS, given the circumstances, is a linux, and my favourite one is Gentoo, since almost a year. The purpose of this thread is, just look for the best settings, as cflags, hdparm settings, and stuff like that.
Just two months ago, setting up a sempron at my office, wanted to "fine tune" my make.conf, and I found a little script (in this forum) that, through a cat command in /proc/cpuinfo, gave as output, possible cflags, and they worked pretty nice, in conjunction with some others I had. Regretfully, I've lost that script, which should have solved half of the problem; besides, I've always installed linux on AMD, so I don't have any experiences on pentium, least with pentium2. I have read as much as I can bear the giant two threads of cflags central, and the search engine of this forum is a bit weird (why doesn't it want to search some words? nevermind, that is another topic), without taking into account that googling this thing gives results EXTREMELY wide.
In one of so many posts I've read, someone said that those people with huge cflags line, rarely had an increase of performance than those that had safe-and-basic-flags. To be honest, it's not my intention to get the secret cpu usage, but yes, I would like to get specific hard-drive parameters, minimal (varied) settings, and a specific set of flags intended for pentium2, which will be a web/ftp/nat/fw server, and also may be highly user-responsive through ssh and from direct input (i.e. in front of the screen), using fluxbox. All that things that, in sum, we all know that would make a difference.

So, ask me any information you may need, I will do any test necessary.

Thanks in advance,

Paul.
_________________
If it moves, it needs an ebuild.

Adopt an unanswered post.

[desultory]

As far as hdparm settings go, I suggest you just use the manual for the drive as a guide.

For CFLAGS, I think this is what you are after.

[odessit]

Server == Stability
Stability != Uber Fast

these CFLAGS I used on my P2-333 server, I tried going crazy, but some apps refused to compile, I scaled down quite a bit after that.
CFLAGS="-march=pentium2 -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
O3 flag actually hindered performance of some apps.

dunno about hdparm, I run SCSI on all my servers and I would REALLY recommend getting at least 256MB RAM, even better 512.

[PeGa!]