Tweet
I'm getting ready to build a new home server. Right now I run a pair of servers using flea-market special motherboards, and most of the rest of the components, for that matter. The "new" board has an i815 and 800MHz PIII. We had a power outage this weekend, and the backup server died on the way up. I haven't started debug yet, but it makes me think I might be skating on thin ice, using pure crap for my servers, even with 100% redundancy.
The servers currently run Hardened Gentoo, serving DNS, DHCP, NFSV4, IMAP, OpenVPN and are a second-level firewall behind my appliance. One thing I'd like out of the new server is to make it a MythTV master backend. Currently NFSV4 serves 40GB RAID-1 as /home, and my MythTV backend machine is on one client, and has its own local storage. I have several MythTV frontend machines attached. In moving a MythTV master backend to the server, I'd like to move the storage (bump it up to 1GB RAID-1) there too, move my network from 100Mbs to 1Gbs. I can't get TV cable into my server closet, so it would run a dummy capture card, and leave the capture cards in the current backend, as a slave backend machine.
So CPU performance isn't paramount - I figure about anything I can buy these days should be adequate. I'd kind of like it to be 64-bit, just to make progress on moving my whole cluster that direction. I am concerned about power, since this is on 24x7, so I'd like a motherboard/CPU combination that supports CPU frequency modulation, and C-states common to laptops would be a bonus. I'd like to make at least 1 part of the RAID mirror external, so I can quiesce it and hotplug another. With 1 internal and 2 external drives, 1 at a time, I have RAID + offsite sparing. (Carry the just-quiesced drive to work as a backup, rebuild the RAID on the drive just brought from work.)
Video is obviously of negligible importance, though something would be good. I need to wind up with at least 2 ethernets, 3 would be better, but only 1 need be Gb, the others can be 100Mb. I recognize that it might be necessary to use slots for the extra networking.
I have a favor-the-underdog/I'm-really-cheap preference for AMD processors.
I've done a little searching, and this is the type of question that keeps coming up every now and then. So here's "now". I've also read through the motherboard brand comparison thread, with no real conclusion other than "they all suck," which only helps in that a few brands seem to suck less. I have several ASUS boards and they've been decent enough to me, though I'm concerned that someone says that they're now farming that job out. There were good comments about Supermicro, though they can be expensive, and Newgg doesn't appear to have any Supermicro AMD boards. I've had Tyan boards in the past, but those are really pricey these days, too.
Thanks, phred14
The servers currently run Hardened Gentoo, serving DNS, DHCP, NFSV4, IMAP, OpenVPN and are a second-level firewall behind my appliance. One thing I'd like out of the new server is to make it a MythTV master backend. Currently NFSV4 serves 40GB RAID-1 as /home, and my MythTV backend machine is on one client, and has its own local storage. I have several MythTV frontend machines attached. In moving a MythTV master backend to the server, I'd like to move the storage (bump it up to 1GB RAID-1) there too, move my network from 100Mbs to 1Gbs. I can't get TV cable into my server closet, so it would run a dummy capture card, and leave the capture cards in the current backend, as a slave backend machine.
So CPU performance isn't paramount - I figure about anything I can buy these days should be adequate. I'd kind of like it to be 64-bit, just to make progress on moving my whole cluster that direction. I am concerned about power, since this is on 24x7, so I'd like a motherboard/CPU combination that supports CPU frequency modulation, and C-states common to laptops would be a bonus. I'd like to make at least 1 part of the RAID mirror external, so I can quiesce it and hotplug another. With 1 internal and 2 external drives, 1 at a time, I have RAID + offsite sparing. (Carry the just-quiesced drive to work as a backup, rebuild the RAID on the drive just brought from work.)
Video is obviously of negligible importance, though something would be good. I need to wind up with at least 2 ethernets, 3 would be better, but only 1 need be Gb, the others can be 100Mb. I recognize that it might be necessary to use slots for the extra networking.
I have a favor-the-underdog/I'm-really-cheap preference for AMD processors.
I've done a little searching, and this is the type of question that keeps coming up every now and then. So here's "now". I've also read through the motherboard brand comparison thread, with no real conclusion other than "they all suck," which only helps in that a few brands seem to suck less. I have several ASUS boards and they've been decent enough to me, though I'm concerned that someone says that they're now farming that job out. There were good comments about Supermicro, though they can be expensive, and Newgg doesn't appear to have any Supermicro AMD boards. I've had Tyan boards in the past, but those are really pricey these days, too.
Thanks, phred14
Comment