Home server hardware recommendations

lazloman

I'm looking at upgrading my hardware before my old server dies on me. I use my server for email, subversion, web and a couple of other things. I'd like to get a box that could last a few years and don't want to spend too much, < $500. I've been looking at maybe getting something brand new, but then again maybe I can find a quality used server. The hard drive is the most likely piece to fail, so in any case, I'll get a new one of those. Anyone have any suggestions on what I should do for a server?
Thanks
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Gentoo x86
2x Dell Optiplex GX200

"My Break-Dancing days are over, but there's always the Funky Chicken."
--The Full Monty

Shining Arcanine · Veteran Joined: 24 Sep 2009 Posts: 1110

Use ECC and RAID 5. It doesn't cost that much, but it should improve reliability. Also, use an Asus motherboard with a Seasonic PSU. Avoid Western Digital hard drives. They have issues in RAID5 unless you get the expensive models, which defeats the purpose of having a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3526

My servers are junk - flea market cast-offs. The current server has a 50-cent flea-market motherboard, a case from an old computer my cousin gave my mom, hard drives from who-knows-where, Promise IDE card, video, etc, all from who-knows where. My spare server is pretty much the same - not a bad idea to have a complete spare, when they're both junk. Actually I'm rebuilding the spare now, because it blew a hard drive/Promise card last summer. I rebuilt it promptly, replacing the bad parts, then delayed for a while installing Ubuntu server and thinking I was actually going to use it. A few weeks back I got serious and installed Gentoo Hardened, again. Actually my current server is getting a little flaky, which is what got me off my duff to get the backup server working.

Once the backup is fully up, it's going to become the prime server for a while, and the current machine is getting decommissioned. Then the (amd64 w/3G) machine in the study is going to turn into the new server, and a new deskside is going into the study. The current machine in the study is my main mythbackend, so it's appropriate that that become a server, anyway.

My servers do DNS, DHCP, IMAP, NFSv4 (/home), rsync for portage, http-replicator, router/firewall, etc. The NFS space is on a RAID-1 mirror, and both prime and spare servers have identical RAID-1 mirrors, and I also use rsync to keep them matched daily.

It works, gives me something to do at hamfests and Flea@MIT, and is more than enough for a family of 4.
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.sigs waste space and bandwidth

lazloman · Posted: Tue Mar 08, 2011 3:14 am Post subject:

RAID-5, huh, I hadn't considered that. That would certainly address my biggest concern, a failed HD rendering by box unusable.
_________________
Gentoo x86
2x Dell Optiplex GX200

"My Break-Dancing days are over, but there's always the Funky Chicken."
--The Full Monty

Shining Arcanine · Veteran Joined: 24 Sep 2009 Posts: 1110

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3526

Or question how much disk space you really need, and consider using RAID-1 instead of anything more exotic. Big disks are pretty cheap these days. RAID-1 increases read bandwidth just like RAID-0, but without the risk, and retains the write bandwidth of a single drive. My impression is that RAID-5 and RAID-6 may do bad things to your write bandwidth, depending on alignment, granularity, etc. The read bandwidth improvement of RAID-1 also multthreads, which the others don't. (The different drives can keep their heads in different seek locations.)
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.sigs waste space and bandwidth

lazloman · Posted: Tue Mar 08, 2011 3:20 pm Post subject:

Wow! Lots of good advice here. Any recs on a good RAID controller? I'm looking at a couple of Promise cards, some good (FastTrak TX2300), some not so good (FastTrak TX4650).
_________________
Gentoo x86
2x Dell Optiplex GX200

"My Break-Dancing days are over, but there's always the Funky Chicken."
--The Full Monty

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3526

norg · Posted: Tue Mar 08, 2011 5:28 pm Post subject:

You should take a look at the AMD CPUs with a low TDP, they may be sufficient for your needs and are cheap. There are several with 2-4 Cores and around 2.5GHz with a 45W TDP. I'm using an AMD4850e on a mikro-atx board, 4GB RAM as my Fileserver that also manages some of other stuff. I prefer Software RAID, so you are not bound to a specific controller and can exchange the hardware easy. I use a SW-RAID 5 with five 1TB Samsung HDDs and one system HDD. And the whole system is full encrypted and the performance is enough for my gigabit network (i put a intel pci-e gbit card in it, to avoid low performance with onboard network).

You should specify your needs, what services are running, how much space do i need etc. and then create the suitable setup.

lazloman · Posted: Fri Mar 11, 2011 7:02 pm Post subject:

I use my box as a mail server, subversion repo,web server, dns, ntp and backup. I know I'll quite a bit of storage, so I'll be looking in the TB range for drives. It's a low use machine as I'm about the only one actively using it although some of the services my passively use. I'm going to start pricing this stuff this weekend and hopefully, by the end of the month, I can start building a new box.
_________________
Gentoo x86
2x Dell Optiplex GX200

"My Break-Dancing days are over, but there's always the Funky Chicken."
--The Full Monty

Mad Merlin · Veteran Joined: 09 May 2005 Posts: 1155

lazloman · Posted: Sat Mar 12, 2011 2:31 am Post subject:

Cool dude,thanks!
_________________
Gentoo x86
2x Dell Optiplex GX200

"My Break-Dancing days are over, but there's always the Funky Chicken."
--The Full Monty

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

I'm using a mini-ITX as a server for the quietness/low-power angle, runs git/ntp/smtp/imap/IM/http and a few other things.

All the advice I can give if you go that direction is that Jetway mobos are junk, their firmware is broken, go with another brand.

cach0rr0 · Posted: Sat Mar 12, 2011 4:17 am Post subject:

bought a used HP DL380 off of craigslist for $150 for just such a purpose
i thought i could deal with the noise, because years back I had a pair of PE8450's, PE6300, and a PE2450, running in my bedroom. Of course, my electric bill on the cooling end was astronomical.
Now that I'm an old fart, turns out no, the DL380 was too loud, and way way too hot.

So, the point of bringing that up...I ended up just opting to deploy KVM guests for all of my server goodies (web, email, vpn). Has some advantages from a security standpoint segregating things off like that (as outlined here), plus it's portable enough, backing up the entire server is as simple as backing up that .img file. Since my desktop stays on 24/7, that works out perfectly.

Something to think about. If you did that, then had an external server that was nothing more than a backup system (low specs, but reliable disks raid'd to all hell), might pan out just as good or better than buying new hardware (assuming of course, that your desktop processor supports KVM)
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Shining Arcanine · Veteran Joined: 24 Sep 2009 Posts: 1110

lazloman · Posted: Wed Jun 01, 2011 2:30 pm Post subject:

In case anyone's still watching this thread, I thought I'd post a followup on my decisions.

I went with an ASUS motherboard, an AMD Phenom II CPU, two Seagate 1TB drives setup as a linux software RAID 1.

It all seems to be running very nicely, thanks again for the advice.
_________________
Gentoo x86
2x Dell Optiplex GX200

"My Break-Dancing days are over, but there's always the Funky Chicken."
--The Full Monty