is this good setup for a reliable server or is it overkill?

~4U rack mount case w/ one power supply
~2 Pentium III 850MHZ processors
~4 * 256 DIMM RAM
~3 36 gig hard drives w/ 3 hot swap bay
~RAID 5 controller

Didnt you already ask this question in a different thread??

Yes, but the thread was one of the many which have gone AWOL.

actually i did post this already but the thread was deleted. . .

The thread *is* around, it's just hiding :D

Seriously, hopefully when we get everything fixed up the threads should reappear as normal. It hasn't been deleted, don't worry ;)

Hey razor...

Looking at the specs of your server, it seems more reasonable for me if you decide to go for redundant power supply, especially (unlike 1U/2U rackmount) since you have so much room inside chais (4U rackmount). At any rate, such an expensive high-end server would do nothing good if the power supply fails.

BTW, what is the purpose of the server? How much traffic do you expect to get in/out the server?

cheers,
:beer:

this server is going to be used for a web/ftp server running linux with perl, php, mysql etc. It will host 500-1000 sites (depending on the hosting plan) with some extra space left over. the server will cost about $6,500

In that case, certainly an extra $200 (or so) for the redundant power supply won't hurt you.

By the way, I believe many people here will tell you that 1000 accounts under any one server is just too much for the server. Why not you built 2 servers for the sampe price?

cheers,
:beer:

Ok, I was hoping that the original thread would be resurrected, but since it wasn't I'll write what I have to say here.

First, get redundant power. Power supplies are the most common cause of system failures -- both absolute faliures and transient faliures (ie, crashes). And make certain that the system can run off of a single power supply: RAID 5 is nice, but you will lose data if one power supply fails and the other can't handle the demands of three power-hungry SCSI drives. I'd spend about $500-600 on two redundant 300W power supplies if I were you.

Drive configuration: Set the system up very carefully. RAID 5 is fast for reading data (the primary task of http/ftp servers) but is very slow for writing it. Make sure you are using buffered logs. Otherwise the server will spend more time logging requests to disk than serving them. That goes double for mysql: If you're just reading stuff from a database, you're fine; if you're writing to the database, expect major performance problems. If you expect much SQL use, I'd seriously consider throwing a 4th drive in and running in RAID 10 mode.

I'd guess that with "normal" traffic patterns, that system could serve 100GB/day of static content if configured well. (Assuming you're running apache; if you run zeus, triple that). Which means 3-6 GB/month for each site given your 500-1000 sites estimate.

Oh, and I'd personally suggest going with FreeBSD rather than linux...