Re: Need server motherboard advice

From: Henrik Carlqvist (Henrik.Carlqvist_at_deadspam.com)
Date: 12/04/04 

Date: Sat, 04 Dec 2004 17:07:42 +0100

Anthony Ewell <aewell@gbis.com> wrote:
> I plan to put White Box Enterprise Linux (WBEL)
> on the server. The server's main two functions will
> be 1) to firewall (iptables) and route to the Internet
> and 2) to share files (Samba).

As sharing files and protecting a network are two completely different
tasks I would recomend two different servers for this.

> The server will also have a RAID 5 card (LSI SATA 150-4)
> and a VXA tape drive.

Depending on your budget you might want to consider things like hotswap,
hot spare and redundancy. That card seems to be meant as a component in a
rather cheap storage solution.

> My choices for motherboard would seem to
> be a p4 with Hyperthread, such as the Supermicro P4sc8
>
> http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/P4/E7210/P4SC8.cfm
>
> or a true dual processor, such as the Supermicro X6DAL-G2
>
> http://supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon800/E7525/X6DAL-G2.cfm

The second motherboard will give you more CPU power, but you won't need
that CPU. The single CPU board supports DDR which is faster than DDRII and
you might find that memory bandwidth useful. The single CPU board also has
a built in SCSI controller. There are hardware raid boxes which internally
contains a number of cheap IDE disks but looks just like one big SCSI disk
to the host computer. Some of those boxes cost more than your server
computer but will then give you hot swap, hot spare and redundant fans and
power supplies.

> Will 20 clients overwhelm a single P4 Hyperthread?

For the file server you will most likely find that the disk(s) become the
bottleneck. For the firewall it will probably be enough with the slowest
machine you are able to find :-)

regards Henrik 

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