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Making a server, need some help/suggestions

C

Colin12

n00b
Joined
Nov 11, 2004
Messages
29
So I recently had a T1 installed at my place of work, of which we are using a laughable 5% on average.

I have taken it upon myself to build a server and do my T1 some justice. However, I don't want to spend an arm and a leg. Here are my questions:

What exactly is meant by 'hot-swap'? Does that mean I just have to take the cage home, stick it in my fileserver at home and viola? Or do I have to actually plug in the cables?

For just sharing files, Im assuming I don't need a big hoss of a processor, something ~2GHz should suffice, yes?

How much memory will I need?

The file sharing medium of choice will be BitTorrent, so I doubt I will need a bunch of ram for FTP clients.

And finally, if anyone can suggest a good pre-built affordable system I would be all ears. Im looking for something with at least one hot swap, CD-RW/DVD, 1 Unit Rackmount. Those features are absolutely set in stone, everything else is up in the air.

Thanks for your help

(c:
 
I will skip over the concern you would have running such an activity at work and the liability that might possibily be incurred by you and your employer. Think about it.

Please excuse me as I do not know your expericene level I am going to keep it simple and in some cases oversimplify/generalize.

What exactly is meant by 'hot-swap'
Hot swap in general, in regards to servers, means you can replace a failed drive "HOT", while the machine is operational. In most cases this would be a failed drive in an mirrored or Raid array. You walk up to the machine, identify the failed drive via software tool or visual/audible indication, yank it out and plug in a new one. The array, if on a decent controller with the ability, will rebuild the information lost on the failed drive and away you go, no downtime. Of couse if the drive is not part of an array and contains your OS and/or is not part of a redundant array of some kind the machine will promply go insane and crash at worst or a big chunk of your files will not be availble to users at best.
Many server chassis have a backplane that all the drives plug into and the disk controller has software that in addition to building and managing the array, allows a HOT spare as well. When a drive is detected as failed or sending out bad data, the bad drive will be maked as bad, and a spare drive that has been sitting plugged in as a HOT spare will then be used to rebuild the array until you can get around to replacing the failed drive.

For just sharing files, Im assuming I don't need a big hoss of a processor, something ~2GHz should suffice, yes?

I tend to agree. you network (taken care of) and disk subsystem will be the bottle necks. I would be sure to get a very very good network card.

How much memory will I need?

Depends on the operating system. There is no point in more that 4 GB in an Windows system unless you are running the server version of the software. Other OSs I dont know. I tend to agree with your obsevation about ftp etc. I would guess even 1 GB would do the trick but I would put in 2GB for an XP Pro system just for giggles.

hmm the 1 U form oh oh. By the way, Hot swap is typically SCSI, forgot to mention that.

Take a look at what acmemicro has to offer, www acmemicro com
It will at least let you see what is out there, I am only up on the 4U chassis so I am going to bail out here.
 
I don't know much about this, but...

I doubt you will need any powerhouse CPU, a AXP 2200+ would be my proc of choice.

I'd go with 256-512MB of RAM, maybe more depending on how many users and files it will hold/distrubute..

Dell *shudder* often has deals on servers that you can pick up for about $300-400, that usually have 256MB-512MB of RAM, 2.4GHz Cellys', 40GB HDD.. Could pick up one of them and add a hot swappable HDD bay if you wish/can...

Hope that helps.
 
Thanks guys.

Dont worry about the legality of things. I wont be sharing movies or music, and the business is mine so I dont have to worry about a boss either.

Thanks for your suggestions!
 
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