Advice on quiet but powerful hardware for Debian
Another request to this amazing list. I've run a web server which
has a few simple perl CGI scripts but also some moderately CPU heavy
R statistics CGI things. The box also runs SMTP (postfix) and double
opt-in Email lists (ecartis). It's all run beautifully stably on an
old box running Debian stable behind another Debian box which acts as
three port firewall. The server box is getting very old and I'd like
to speed up the R things so it's time to upgrade. Graphics power is
not an issue on this machine as it's almost used only in text mode
over ssh.
Budget is not huge but my biggest constraint is probably that I have
very little time for sysadmin work any more as this isn't my paying
job. Other huge constraint is that the machines sit in the room I
work in and listen to music in. I'd love to make the machine as
quiet as possible within the need for some real grunt power.
So questions I have are:
1) Can anyone recommend any company or consultant who puts together
Debian based systems in the UK?
2) Assuming I do it myself I'm telling myself that it's probably time
to go to SATA, to use at least RAID0 mirroring to minimise risk of
losing things, to push the CPU power as high as I can (dual
processor?) and the RAM up to 1G at least and perhaps to add some DVD
writer for backup (though currently I can get the all the things I
need to backup onto a CD).
I have been thinking of Opteron CPU looking toward Debian64 some day
but perhaps that's a bit distant and a bad basis on which to go that
way. Any recommendations of drives, CPU, RAM and motherboards and
the trade off of quiet/powerful? Reply to me or the list: I'll
collate and summarise. Thanks in advance.
Chris
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