Computer recommendation for Linux server.

[Ehud Karni]

On Thu, 7 May 2009 19:40:14 Josh Roden wrote:
>
> I need to setup a Linux Centos Samba file server.
>
> The server should have Raid 1 or 5 with a high storage capability (up to
> 4 or 8 TB).
>
> The budget is around 3,000 shekels so an HP or IBM machine probably won't
> be relevant.

> Last, but not least, the machine should be Linux compatible at least from
> your experiences if not in writing.

I have just such a server at home. It serves 4 clients. It has 1.5TBx4
RAID5 (4.1 TB net) and runs samba. This is my 2nd server. It is active
for 3 month now. The 1st server (still active) had only 1.5 TB and ran
out of space. It is about 2 years old (serving from 20/7/2007).
Besides using it as a server it is used as a desktop.

The budget was about the same for both machines and is:

Box: Dual CPU E2200, 2GB memory,
     160 GB disk, RW DVD               1060 [1]
Disks - 4 * 1.5 TB                     2130 [2]
SATA2 card, 4 ports (2 will suffice)    150 [3]
some cables and fans                     60
                                       ====
                                       3400
[1] - Bought in a sale in Mega (yes, the supermarket).
[2] - Bought in the USA in 1/09
[3] - STLAB, on both machine

Of course you should have a UPS (I do).

Here are some data about it:

Filesystem           1M-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1                19376      5248     13129  29% /
/dev/md/d0p2           2830775   1388674   1442102  50% /RAID
/dev/md/d0p1           1394262    223326   1170937  17% /RAID-small

old-fs:/LCL-RAID       1408361   1377580     30781  98% /OLD-RAID


# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]
md_d0 : active raid5 sdb1[0] sde1[3] sdd1[2] sdc1[1]
      4395407808 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU]

# uname -a
Linux ekc-fs 2.6.18-92.1.22.el5.centos.plus #1 SMP Wed Dec 17 10:49:19 EST 2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Samba version 3.0.33-3.7.el5

> Last, but not least, the machine should be Linux compatible at least from
> your experiences if not in writing.

To this day, I installed Linux on many machines (brand names and
white boxes, but not laptops), I have found all the machines to
be "Linux compatible".

Ehud.


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