[rescue] Challenge XL in SE VA Did Not Wait For Me!

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Tuesday 23 November 2004 14:49, Wes Will wrote:
> Ah, well, that'll teach me to dither.  Hope that XL gets a good home
> where it will be used and appreciated.
>
> Onward, onward.
>
> What would be the consensus of this bunch of the ideal (preferrably
> well under 100-kilos; arthritis means I can't lift like I used to)
> server for about 7 internet domains, mail (via Postfix with antispam
> and antivirus a la Spamassassin and Clam or similar), web hosting,
> DNS hosting, and file services?

My response will include asking how much traffic do you expect, and what 
kind of web site?  Something with static pages will fair much better 
than, say, a PHP, or JSP-based site.  As well, Spamassassin is a bit of 
a resource hog, being written in Perl, and the load on the mail server 
matters quite a bit as well.

Depending on traffic, a machine somewhere between a 143MHz Ultra 1 and a 
dual-300MHz Ultra 2 or Ultra 60 should be good for Sun hardware, 
depending on the traffic the server will see.  I'd avoid using Intel 
hardware running a Linux (especially RedHat/Fedora), as it makes you a 
bit of an easier (ie more common) target than, say, an UltraSparc 
running a Linux variant (or Net/OpenBSD).

RS/6000s make fairly nice UNIX boxes as well, until I moved it to a Sun 
E3000 (over powered, but part of the reason for the move was increased 
disk storage space), I was running my website off a 233MHz RS/6000 
43P-140.

I'm not sure I'd recommend using SGI or HP unix hardware for hosting 
domains off of, but that may be mostly because I don't use much of that 
stuff anyhow.

Oh, one last thought... a 400-600MHz 21164A-based alpha box will go a 
long way towards being a useful webserver.  I've got a 600MHz 
AlphaPC/164LX-based box at home running my network services and serving 
up NFS off a fiberchannel (software) raid to my machines at home (as 
my /home).  Alpha's can be a bit pricy, but they're damn nice 
machines. : )

Pat
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