• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Need help building sff linux web server

K

karmasoft

Weaksauce
Joined
Nov 20, 2004
Messages
88
1) What will you be doing with this PC? Gaming? Photoshop? Web browsing? etc

Hosting a couple of low traffic web sites. Planning on running ubuntu 9.1 with xampp package. Prefer micro atx form factor due to lack of space. Its going to be situated in the guest room (which doubles as my home office) so it needs to be quiet, ideally totally silent.

2) What's your budget? Are tax and shipping included?

As cheap as possible. I would compromise cost in favor of noise however (depending on cost).

3) Where do you live?

Salt Lake City

4) What exact parts do you need for that budget? CPU, RAM, case, etc. Please be very specific.

Case (smallest form factor possible), cpu, psu, mobo, and ram.

5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing? Please be especially specific about the power supply. List make and model.

My spare parts bin has 2 Maxtor DMax sata 300gb 3.5" HD's ... I'd like to re-use those if possible, to save money (http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?item=N82E16822144421). But if they're going to require excessive cooling which means running noisy fans ... I'd ditch them.

6) Will you be overclocking?

No

7) What size monitor do you have and/or plan to have?

Its a server so n/a.

8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC?

Today?

9) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? Crossfire or SLI support? etc.

Nothing fancy except a mobo capable of booting from usb, not that that's fancy any more.

10) Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license? If yes, what OS? 32bit or 64bit?

Gonna be ubuntu most likely.

---------------

I was thinking of this case ... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129034 ... i like the cases with the psu included, unless the psu is loud. Not sure about this particular psu.

I was thinking this mobo / cpu combo might be good enough ... http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.334873
 
The case+PSU combo is a very quiet setup.

The CPU/mobo combo is great if you're willing to pay the higher prices for DDR2 RAM now.
 
Well i've hosted some sites on Intel Atom servers so it all depends on traffic. Myabe atom could be enough for you

What do you prefer, a Desktop system, tower, cube minitower, It seems space is an important factor that's why I'm asking.

A Chenbro ES34069 with an Intel Mini-ITX board (DQ45EK for instance) can fulfill your needs and be pretty much dead silent except for your HDDs
 
Since I'm terribly impatient, I pulled the trigger. :)

Ended up with a different case because I needed something slightly shallower... anyway, ~$420 total, including shipping. Hopefully this does the trick.

Sundial Micro ...

Silverstone Grandia GD05 (SST-GD05-B, SST-GD05B)
96.99

Cooler Master Silent Pro (RS-600-AMBAD3-US, RS600-AMBAD3-US)
78.99

Newegg ...

Foxconn M61PMV AM2+/AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
Item #: N82E16813186155
$44.99

AMD Sempron X2 2200 2.0GHz Socket AM2 65W Dual-Core Processor Model SDO2200IAA4DO - OEM
Item #: N82E16819103826
$35.99

Kingston ValueRAM 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 533 (PC2 4200) Desktop Memory Model KVR533D2N4/1G - Retail
Item #: N82E16820144151
($21.99 ea) x2
$43.98

SILVERSTONE NT01-E 2 x 60mm fans (optional) CPU Cooler - Retail
Item #: N82E16835220032
$49.99

Arctic Silver Ceramique Thermal Compound - OEM
Item #: N82E16835100009
$4.99

Amazon ...

Bootable 4 GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive - Preloaded with UBUNTU Desktop 9.10
$19.99
 
As an Amazon Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
Let us know how the build goes. nVidia wouldn't have been my first choice for a chipset in a Linux box, but support seems to be slowly improving in the reverse-engineered drivers, so hopefully it will be stable for you.

For 'a couple of low-traffic websites' I would have also suggested Atom, it's likely far more than you need.
 
keenan said:
Let us know how the build goes. nVidia wouldn't have been my first choice for a chipset in a Linux box, but support seems to be slowly improving in the reverse-engineered drivers, so hopefully it will be stable for you.
Click to expand...
Errrr ..... NVIDIA has been providing official Linux drivers for almost a decade now (though for obvious reasons its closed source) unlike ATI which only started supporting linux a few years back.

Its precisely the reason I have hated ATI and have never bought their products.

NVIDIA rocks as far as Linux support goes!
 
I didn't say video, I said chipset. There are reversed engineered drivers for some of the hardware, and for some of it you require opaque binary blobs that aren't maintained by the kernel developers and can't be maintained, fixed or properly tested against your distribution. That's a far less than optimal situation for a server. I've also had quite a few issues with them in the past.

As far as video, nVidia's stuff works pretty well most of the time, but not releasing specifications or open source drivers really cripples the options in a lot of ways with their stuff. I'd much rather back ATI, which while it took them longer, is actually doing things the right way.
 
Right there I wouldn't have gone for an Nvidia chipset either for a server. It's just not required.

Let us know how it goes
 
Hopefully i won't trip over the on board video ... will post an update once this is assembled.

On a related note, someone in newegg's reviews section pointed out this excellent review of the Silverstone GD05 ... the site has some other nice reviews too. Kudos to K.S. Studios.
 
Dual Core Atom should be fine. These sound like personal sites which I assume will see very little traffic on them?
 
All the parts arrived and the system is assembled.

Unfortunately the Maxtor 300gb drives from my spare parts bin aren't recognized in the bios. Actually *one* of them *was* recognized *once*. Since then I've tried every combination imaginable ... different sata ports, different sata cables, different power locations on the modular power supply ... nothing works. Neither drive gets recognized. :confused:

I think the drives must be dead. They don't make any noise whatsoever when the system is powered on. How one of them worked once, is beyond me.
 
Oh noes I typed too soon...

So I took the suspected dead HD's and tried them in my regular PC ... they are recognized, np.

Does this mean the sata controller on my new mobo is bad? :mad:
 
Could be. If they're not spinning up at all though I'd be inclined to blame the PSU or power cables first...
 
Vengance_01 said:
Dual Core Atom should be fine. These sound like personal sites which I assume will see very little traffic on them?
Click to expand...

For serving some low-traffic Web sites, even a single core Atom would be quite sufficient. That's just not a terribly demanding activity. The machine built here is substantially overpowered for the task described.

An Intel Johnstown board in a Morex T1610 case would have done the job just fine (and with a much smaller footprint.)

These components plus memory and a hard drive can be had for less than $300.

Obviously, this setup would not have accommodated the existing 3.5" hard drives; though it seems now that's a moot point.
 
keenan said:
Could be. If they're not spinning up at all though I'd be inclined to blame the PSU or power cables first...
Click to expand...

Further testing indicates they spin up ... *without* the Sata cable connected, just power. However once you plug in the sata cable, they don't spin up.
 
If you've made sure to try a known-good SATA cable and tried a couple different SATA connectors on the motherboard I'd say it's time to RMA it.
 
I've tried 2 known good sata cables, I've verified the HD's are Ok, and I verified the power cable to the HD's are ok. There's an issue with the sata controller.

I will give Foxconn a chance to remediate before I rma it. I followed their lousy on-line support procedure to file a customer support issue.

----------------------------

Dear Sir/Madam,
we have received your issue and would give you solution as soon as possible, please wait patiently.

Thanks! If you want to get more details on Foxconn products, visit our official website please.http://www.foxconnchannel.com/index.aspx

Best regards,
Foxconn Technical Support
 
If you purchased from NewEgg you might want to contact them directly as well. I've heard they're pretty good about remedying situations like this.
 
This build is turning into a real boondoggle...

RMA'ing these to Newegg...

1.) Foxconn M61PMV AM2+/AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail

>> defective sata controller

2.) SILVERSTONE NT01-E 2 x 60mm fans (optional) CPU Cooler - Retail

>> missing mount point for 1 of the 4 triad mounts

So..... *deep breath* ..... I'm taking this "opportunity" to re-assess. (ie, what i should have done in the first place)

I found some more potentially re-usable parts in my parts bin: some old memory that I paid > $500 for five years ago, and a cpu cooler that may fit in the GD05 case.

Any thoughts if these could be re-used: ?

OCZ EL Platinum Revision 2 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400

bought jan 2005 for $566.09

Thermalright XP-120 CPU Cooling Heatsink - Retail

bought jan 2005 for $64.99

I also have an AMD FX-55 that i paid 8 benjis for back in the day... :( not sure if thats better than my shiny new Sempron though. ? Help. :)
 
DDR memory isn't too useful today. Everything is DDR2, but if you have a motherboard that can run it with the FX-55, that'd be an okay system for this, though a bit power hungry. New Sempron should be faster and lower power I would think.

Sucks you got some dud parts, it's really a pain in the ass to deal wtih. A big reason I'm willing to pay the premium for 'premium' brands.
 
What Keenan said.

At most you'll only be able to reuse that HSF. That new Sempron more than likely outperforms that AMD FX-55
 
just to chime in, i have a small server with an intel d201gly2 mini-itx board, it has a 1.2 GHz fanless dothan based celeron, which outperforms an atom.

The only downside, the chipset is sis (yeah, sis on an intel built board), which is OK on just about everything except the video driver, which doesnt work well above 800*600. I just run my box without a gui environment, just a shell, which i ssh into.

be on your toes for atom boards and linux though, i wanted to replace the d201 (because of the vid driver) with an intel atom 330 board, and couldnt get the network interface to work under linux.. needless to say the atom got sold and the d201 is still running

the d201 is fitted into a procase noah with a normal 3,5" harddrive, excellent, cheap, small combo
 
I bought an Intel Little Falls 2 board. Everything works out of the box. Haven't tested sound but that's it.
 
I really like that Noah case. I'm left wondering if I could have accomplished what I set out to do with a mini-atx footprint. :(

Like cars, my build is getting bigger and more expensive. I shipped the foxconn mobo (terrible), the heatsink (broken) and the 533 memory back to newegg. On a side note, why oh why do *I* have to pay *them* to return broken stuff? :mad:

Keenen >> "A big reason I'm willing to pay the premium for 'premium' brands."

I couldn't agree more so I spent $15 more for an Asus mobo. I'm justifying the cost by trying to re-use my Thermaltake 120 ... not sure how well that will go.

While I was at it, I went to ddr2 800 series ram... i guess if my web sites fail i can always re-purpose this puppy to be an htpc. ;)
 
karmasoft said:
I really like that Noah case. I'm left wondering if I could have accomplished what I set out to do with a mini-atx footprint.
Click to expand...

if the thing is only a low-traffic webserver, yes a mini-itx machine would have been up to the task.

My procase noah houses a simple 1.2 dothan based celeron, not a powerhouse by any count, but more then enough for simple webhosting. Besides, there are plenty of s775 mini-itx mobos (from intel themselves, or zotac), put a single core 1.8 celeron in there, and it will work a lot faster, you could even go dual core, although i would doubt if the procase noah case would be able to take a dual core, power/heatsink wise.

I just resurected my mini-itx server, just to play with :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top