Server Crisis... Averted
Posted by Trejkaz Mon, 07 Feb 2005 03:46:00 GMT
This might possibly be my first on-topic post ever on this weblog since it relates directly to Trypticon infrastructure. Amazing.
Our little server box at home was having some serious issues last week. Logging in from work was almost impossible at times, and towards Friday it seemed that logging in from the local network was just as futile. Packet loss was starting to top 60% even when pinging from another machine hanginf off the same switch. Complete madness.
Anyway, since it didn’t happen on the previous install which was on the machine, I had two suspicions…
- Something about networking in kernel-2.6.8.1 was screwy, or
- Something about the network card itself was screwy.
Not wanting to gamble, I figured I would fix both issues at once. The particular network card we were using to connect it to the LAN was amazingly a 10Mb/s card (must have been the one we used to run between the server and the cable modem, back when it used to do our routing,) so I switched it over to use the 100Mb/s card instead. That should have the obvious benefits. :-)
Aside from that, I had it compile a new kernel overnight (literally… it took somewhere on the order of eight hours to complete) and rebooted in the morning.
Everything was more or less fine after that, with only one obvious problem remaining. That problem is this: you can’t expect to run Apache, Samba, Postfix, and at least three other services on a machine with only 64MB of RAM, and expect all services to be responsive at the same time. :-)
So I’ve come to the conclusion that we need to replace the server even though it’s working again for now. It’s been running for a very long time now, my best recollection is getting it some time around 1998, so it’s lasted extremely long under the circumstances. The machine used to run Windows and first became a Linux server when I wanted to run Windows and Linux without the hassle of dual booting… back when I was still sceptical of Linux as a desktop OS (of course, I’m thoroughly sold on the idea of Linux as a desktop OS these days.)
So the new server, well… it doesn’t have to be shit-hot. My current thoughts look something like this…
- Cheap motherboard with everything on-board, assuming it has on-board networking that doesn’t completely suck. Two network interfaces is considered a bonus, but I don’t believe such a thing exists on any motherboards which still count as “cheap.”
- 2.4GHz Celeron or similar low-end, less heat-prone CPU.
- 256 or 512MB RAM. 256MB would honestly be enough right now, but with 512MB I might even be able to run my Java-based web server from it, along with everything else.
- 120GB hard drive. I will most likely stick to the standard Western Digital on this. I may be inclined to switch to using RAID-1 in the future though, so perhaps it’s a better idea to stick to 80GB on the initial disk, getting dual 120GB disks in the future.
- Reasonably quiet case and power supply, at least as quiet as possible without breaking the budget.
Ideally, it would be a completely fanless setup to ultimately remove noise, but I get the feeling that this isn’t possible without going overboard. The budget for this system is around $400, which I’m finding hard to meet.
So if anyone wants to suggest a way I can meet this budget, go ahead. :-)