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I've started looking into buying a new server for KernelTrap, hoping to make the purchase within the next month. I'm currently planning on building a simple 1.2GHz PIII, in total running less than $750. Very affordable, though I'm also considering something a little more powerful. The requirements: 2 NICs, redundant disk drives, 1U. Danube Technologies has kindly offered to host the server for free, an offer I have gratefully accepted.
If you wish to help out in this effort, donations are certainly welcome. However, don't worry if you aren't in a position to make a donation, the upgrade is going to happen no matter what. In any case, a handful of people have suggested that they'd make donations if the option was available, and any little bit helps. 100% of the money I receive will go towards purchasing the new KernelTrap server. (On the off chance more money is donated than is needed, the extra money will go towards soliciting original articles for KernelTrap, such as is done by any magazine [story]. But I'm getting ahead of myself...)
Note that with a KernelTrap user account you can disable the PayPal icon... Among other things. So if the icon bothers you, log in.
But...
What OS will it run? ;-)
Re: But...
and, it it is Linux, which distribution :-)
probably the same it does now ?
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.kerneltrap.com
Connection: close
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2003 20:08:48 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.22 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) PHP/4.0.6
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.0.6
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=d7ff126973589911d279ee5865126d74; path=/
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html
Lennie.
re: But...
As my background is in Linux, that's what I'll be installing.
The plan is simple: I'll start with RedHat 7.3 (again, just because that's my background), however disabling everything I don't need, and compiling everything I do need from source. A recent kernel, Apache, PHP, a PHP cache, and MySQL. Everything properly tuned, we should (finally) be able to handle even Slashdot.
PHP Accelerator is the best PHP compiler/optimizer/cache IMHO. While it is not Open Source, it is free, and I can vouch for the code as I used to help with the FreeBSD port many moons ago. Yahoo use it too, which is a good recommendation.
APC
I'm not unhappy about APC, so I haven't had the need to go non-OpenSource.
try gentoo-linux
www.gentoo.org
is a source-based linux-distro (i've used redhat/suse before)
Re: But...
I think the more important question is: why is it important which OS it will run (for us site users, anyway)? :)
--
schnee
lowest price Athlon XP +Ellite ECS K7S5A
150 dollars, rock solid, with integrated Ethernet, works extremly well for me.
You can put (SDRAM 100 or 133), xor (DDR266 or 333)
then a realtek 8139 for 15 extra dollars you have redundant ethernet
the board has a Sis Chipset, wich supports up to ATA100.
Also Hardware monitoring. Everything supported, check the howto this board has for more details. There are good comments about this board from kernel hackers on lkml
funny ?!
why so funny today?!
but for thjose who dunno...
NEVER USE REALTEK -> http://www.fefe.de/linuxeth/realtek.txt
btw: the onboard lan u mention is no gigabit lan, ull have to upgrade soon... :-(
the k7s5a board is only too cheap... but tehre is no quality management... if u have luck u get a good board, but many many ppl complain about instabilities...
ata100? u dont go for scsi?! u should think twice... but maybe ure right and spend the xtra money u need for scsi into more ram...
but the athlonxp is the only thing, i would take from ur thread... and i dont see why u mix such a great processor with such low cost instable or bad components... that hurts...
never bye intel ones, never. so even DONT USE the pIII... (the pre-tcpa thingie with the serial number ;-)
Eugene
Intel CPU's are very very re
Intel CPU's are very very reliable. The unique ID thing is in the past, I wouldn't worry about it. Personally, I don't trust AMD CPU's in my webservers just yet. Maybe with the new 64bit chip I would give one a try.
AMD
Why not?
--
schnee
Well, I have always had AMD C
Well, I have always had AMD CPU's right from K5-166 up t K62-300 (oh - and my 386DX 40mhz!) and always blamed Windows for crashing a lot. Then I decided to get a Dual PII-500 setup and it was so amazingly solid that I couldn't believe I had been buying AMD for all that time (3-4 CPU's in a row).
I came to upgrade my desktop machine again last year and decided to give AMD another try and bought an AthlonXP setup. Back came the general instabilities and I wished I had stayed with Intel.
All my servers run Intel chips, and will continue to do so, as they have been flawless. The data centre where my machines are hosted have reported many more problems with AMD chips in servers and they too recommended Intel.
This all adds up to my decision to not trust AMD just yet. At the end of the day I buy hardware for my servers based on 1) reliability, 2) price, 3) performance. Until AMD can convince me their chips are stable enough I will stay with Intel. And you can't say I haven't given them much chance because I have.
My next upgrade to my desktop will be Intel. I am looking at getting dual Xeon 2.4ghz chip setup. I could get dual Athlon 2.2ghz but again I just don't trust em and can only remember the wonderful stability of my last Dual Intel setup.
Thats my experience.
Jamie.
why is an AMD issue?
BTW: why are your sure unstabilities were caused by processor and not by other components? eg: motherboard/chipset?
Motherboard Chipset
The AMD machines I've built have been perfectly stable. The trend in people with bad AMD experiences seems to be bad motherboard selection.
My desktop/workstation box (although it occasionally plays the role of a server) that I'm using now hasn't crashed except for the time that a RAM module that eventually went bad. It has a Abit KG7 (AMD-761) motherboard (with an old Athlon 1200 Mhz T-Bird). It was one of the higher-end motherboards when I bought it. My machine is running Debian, if it matters.
The machine that my family built for my mother is using some MSI board, and it doesn't seem to crash often (although the UT2K3 demo blue screened Win2K on it once, heh).
The other machine in the house is an old 400 Mhz P2. The hardware in that box is getting old, and the Win2K installation is badly managed, so it's moderately unstable (although it's making its owner interesting in getting Linux installed on it :)). I wouldn't blame the Intel chip for any of that though.
If it helps me seem more non-biasnessed somehow, I'll mention that I used to have an AMD K6-II 500 Mhz that would constantly overheat (the CPU and Heatsink/Fan were bought already on the board, as I'd never owned a Socket 7 chip before). The overheating (which would force me to power it off) made it 'feel' unstable and shoddy. I'm glad I gave AMD another chance with non-crappy hardware though :)...
Forgot to mention...
I forgot to mention that we've (my family) built some clones of the MSI/Duron box that was built for my mother (I also left out, that the machine my mother received with the MSI board used a Duron 1 Ghz), and except for some problems with an ethernet card, they've done well too.
re: Well, I have always had AMD C
I wouldn't trash AMD based on your experience. Neither would I trash Intel based on a similar experience by another person.
It's just that good-neutral-bad luck of the draw experiences happen to different people. I am on of the neutrals on the stability issue, as I never had a flakey cpu from either company.
I happen to champion AMD for the simple reasons of high performance and low price (clock speed isn't everything). I just upgraded from an Athlon 1.1 Ghz to an Athlon XP 1700+ and an ASRock motherboard for usb 2.0 ports. May not seem like much of an upgrade, but the performance increase is significant. (the mobo is an el cheapo though)
The guy who is buying the server requires reliability. A server has to be reliable, and he can only go in accordance with his experience: he has lousy luck with AMDs and good luck with Intels. Therefore he is going with Intel. I am not going to try and convince him otherwise.
One thing I have found: most OS stability issues (usually Windows) can be traced to flakey hardware.
I used to work in Quality Control at a printed circuit board manufacturer. QC of a lot is based on a statistical sample of the lot, where Military sample is twice civilian sample. So it is highly possible for bad ones to slip through QC. This is true for any part or product. It is possible in the random sampling to get all the good ones, where the rest are bad (it has happened).
Jamie, go with what you have the best experience with and don't let anyone change your mind on this.
Charles
AMD quite reliable too....
OpenBSD 3.2-stable + Duron 1GHz + ASUS A7V133 = rock solid config !
I have always used ASUS motherboards and would not try anything else. As some others have pointed out, your problem may come from some parts other than the CPU.
ata100 is shiit, realtek 8139 too, and k7s5a is too much cheap
what do you spect from 150$???
750$ is what he wants to spend...
750
-150
------
600$ for 1U rackmount + memory + hard disks + controller + UPS
by the way I have routed+NATed 60GBytes of traffic in a day with two realtek 8139 and a K6-II @400Mhz with a motherboard with 521KB. No error/load problems at all.
what's the peak network load of kerneltrap.org?
aggregated 400Mbps??
Most of the notes in http://www.fefe.de/linuxeth/realtek.txt
are driver programming issues and some high performance related ones... it's not a problem for most situations
And I never heard apart from this note about unstabilities...
I know about many people using this cards, this card never caused problems for them.
And I'm using this config in a server, with 76 days of uptime now. Even it doesn't has an UPS!
I think Realtek is Linux/Open Source friendly.
you said
> u dont go for scsi?
SCSI? really?
I prefer an ATA100 3year warranty WD caviar with 8MB cache than a low end SCSI (remember the budget available???)
motherboard with 512KB of cache
It had 128MB of ram
realtek, scsi and 76 days uptime...
> by the way I have routed+NATed 60GBytes of traffic in a day with
> two realtek 8139 and a K6-II @400Mhz with a motherboard with
> 521KB. No error/load problems at all.
its not a matter of thruhput... its a matter of simultanous connections... if u have many connections to your server the realtek WILL die...
and dont underestimate the cpu load... coze the cpu is needed for sql/php/apache... and it is a good idea to have a nic, caculating some things itself...
and now we are in the scsi issue... :-)
if u have ide the cpu load is even with dma something u dont want...
ok with some raid card maybe u fix it allready, but that card if its cheap has too less cache... so ur 8 mb wd drive wont help i think...
and its not only a matter of cache... its about 10.000 upm (+) against 7200 upm max.
and u have the warrenty, the scsi cdrive is build for 24/7 and runs for zears with manufacturers guarantee... look into the ide techdoc/manual/... some ide drives todaz have warrentees under 1 year... and there allready was the ibm issue, u remember?!
and last note to your "76 days of uptime now" ... usually a server shouldt crash... never! no matter what u do, no matter what load u put onto it... and usually they will never crash...
but the problem is... what if ur server runs and runs and runs, but cant serve all requests in time?
Eugene
not enough...
In deed it doesn't was 60 Gigabytes/day but 60Gigabytes within 12/11 hours (a hort party day)
I think that is a lot of concurrent traffic
you also say that
a 7200rpm drive is not enough
8MB cache per drive is not enough
you should also take care that for the hardware you mention 750$ is not enough
that's the premise
I would be very interesting to know what kind/how much load the server has
memory
block i/o
network i/o
and what is spected...
so we can figure out better...
for instance, the board I mentioned (K7S5A) can have "just" 1GB of RAM
60GB over 24 hours is not eve
60GB over 24 hours is not even 10Mbit, the issues described in the document were performance related, using the card at one tenth of its quoted potenial does not qualify it as stable.
Realtek
That seems to be quite obsolete. Have a look at the kernel drivers. Their authors appear to have been happy with the features of Realtek chipsets.
Realtek
RT 8139 sucks.... well, something not suitable for print. ;)
any reason?
why does it sucks?
because is a lowend?
lowend hardware is fine for me if it works reliable.
Re: any reason?
I can't speak from experience myself, so may want to take this with a grain of salt, but from what I know, nics based on chips like the RealTek 8139 etc. leave much to be desired performance-wise when compared to other (more expensive) nics.
--
schnee
Then what to buy?
I currently have a RTL8139 based NIC, and it seems to be just fine for my 5 PC LAN, but I'll be moving to a dormroom with my gf soon, and I might want to upgrade a few parts before the lady gets to call all the shots when it comes to the economy. Not that I'm unhappy with my NIC as it is, the throughput might be a bit low and for some reason my box is a fairly laggy when using NFS.
But the question then, which is the best NIC that forfills these basic needs:
High throughput (speed is important)
Constant throughput (but not just in peaks)
Vendor must support OSS development (None of that kernel tainting crap that makes life hard for the nice kernel hackers)
Stable drivers (Don't want it crashing my kernel)
We here buy natsemis for all
We here buy natsemis for all our servers (well, actually, FA311s from Netgear). They perform very well, and the driver's been in the kernel for yonks.
Michael
The Linksys LNE100TX (using v
The Linksys LNE100TX (using various revisions of Lite-On PNICs) is a fairly solid Tulip card, and can be had for ~$10 if you look around. Whether the various Tulip drivers are kludges or exercises in supporting a broad family of hardware that at least *tried* to be standardized is an exercise left to the reader. Linksys is a vaguely opensource-friendly name, sort of.
Basically, just about anything is better than an 8139, and 'good enough' for serious use. Beware of D-Link? cards that slap a silkscreen over the chipset to confuse you and hide their RealTekness.
I'm really bad at this it seems
Because my laptops NIC is a D-Link 660, and I can just warn people about that one... it's SO crappy it almost physically hurts me to use it.
lowend?
even the 3com 3c905-tx-m and co are lowend when u look at the price... they are cheap - so cheap, why u try to get cheapter than this?! there is no reason... u cant safe 100s of dollars this way...
and remember the sentence... : there is no thing, which cant be produced cheaper by leaving out features and quality...
Eugene
what a falacy!
expensive doesn't imply better!
inexpensive doesn't imply worse!
"there is no thing, wich cant be produced cheaper by leaving out features and quality..."
That's why I like Open Source, I get better and more for less
thats not what i meant
> expensive doesn't imply better!
> inexpensive doesn't imply worse!
of course!
but thats not what i said... i said that if u can get a premium product for only 10 more dollars, u should bye this...
dont save 10 dollars and get much worse quality...
> "there is no thing, wich cant be produced cheaper by leaving out
> features and quality..."
> That's why I like Open Source, I get better and more for less
me too... but we speak about hardware... and there is no such thing as open hardware, i mean u cant get hardware for zero money... (only the specs... as open cpu projects, etc...)
ok?!
Eugene
AMD / Realtek *FINE*
I don't know where you guys come from.
Since the Athlon, AMD CPUs kick serious butt. Seriously. We've shipped *HUNDREDS* of them and have *NO* stability problems that aren't fixed with a Windows reinstall (and the Linux machines have zero problems, have one machine with 300+ days uptime at ~92% load).
As for Realtek, I've got a fileserver with 100GB of AutoCAD drawings and .TIFF scans. It gets hit all day by 10 engineers, and 20 CAD techs. Let's just say that Autodesk is not friendly to Samba. At peak time I can be moving as much as 65 Mbits sustained (says mrtg) and there are zero problems with the 8139s in it. We've shipped hundreds of these cards in workstations and other servers too.
Before spouting off about random hits in your Google search maybe you should actually try building testing more than, say, two machines.
-K
whats the current hardware?
whats the current hardware like? oh, and what patches will you apply to the kernel?
re: whats the current hardware?
http://kerneltrap.org/node.php?id=324#1.1
Just a piece of advice
buy it with ECC ram, if you want stability.
some additional advice
if you'll buy IDE, I'd suggest the:
http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20020305/index.html
or the:
http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20021011/wd2000jb-08.html