Hi Everyone,

I am new to the forum, I guess most of you are from the other side of the pond, so hello from england.

I am looking to set up a game server, I have read some archive documents on your forum and found some interesting stuff out. I have a few questions, so please feel free to share from your knowledge and experience.

I already run a webhosting business and have rack space available.

I have ordered an Antec 2u case Cant post urls :( It's this model 2U26ATX300UK

I noticed in one of the posts about cooling in a 2u. Are the fans this box comes with good enough? Or should I replace with Sunon's?

I have bought a Tyan board and have ordered x2 MP Athlon 2800 processors. From the idvice read in archive, I will probably run x2 ata ide with 8mb buffers, unless there is something better you can suggest.

One of the discussions I was reading about was linux vs Windows. I have never used linux, but did use unix for a couple of years on an ibm rs/6000. I don't know if aix is anything like linux, kind of steered clear of it until now. Am I flogging a dead horse, with the idea of learning linux and setting it up on this machine? Are there good guides? What versin of linux is best for this?

My intention is to run Windows 2k3 as I have a greater understanding of how to set it up. I would like to run as many copies of Medal of Honor Allied Assult or Spearhead. I have no idea how many copies of the game engine can be managed by this machine, any ideas?

Bandwidth should not be a problem. I have 5mb bursting to 10mb

MOHAA is based on the Quake 3 engine, are there any tweaks anyone knows of for a multiple processor enviroment?

Sorry for all the questions, hope you can help me.

Regards
Andy

Hi Andy

I cant really advice on the hardware issues.

However, I can recommend windows to linux as the majority of games are all windows based, and the overall performance difference (when running games) is negligible.

Why do you want to run 2003 Server ? XP would probably be cheaper/easier to use/more compatible with the majority of games now available.

In regards to how many copies of games your machines should run, this entirely depends on how many game slots you are running per server. So say you could have 15 copies of the server software running, each running a one on one tournament kind of event, or you could have just 2 running a 16 player game each.

Roughly speaking (and I wouldnt take this as 100% guaranteed, as it depends if your using CPU intensive modifications or just the plain game engine) I'd say you'd get about 2 lots of 32 player server slots on these or multiples thereof.

In regards to the MOHAA engine adaptation of Quake III, I'm not entirely sure how they've used it, however there is an option in Quake III to use SMP multi-proccessor support which is easily turned on via an options menu, however I'm sure if this isnt an option on the menu of MOHAA that you could find the Quake III console command for it and try it in the MOHAA console. I speak from just playing the game in client mode, I'm not entirely sure if this is applicable to the server or what impact it may have.

Just my 2 cents, hope they're of use ;)

Regards

Matt
Netsender