zxcvbob wrote: > Geeks.com has refurbished 1U mini rack-mount servers, about 5 years > old, for cheap enough that I want to get one to play with. Two > 4-core Xeon processors (do not support hyperthreading) and either > 4GB or 8GB of RAM, a small hard drive, RAID controller, no sound, > and very low-end integrated graphics. I have bought various random machines from Geeks and I have always had a good experience with Geeks themselves. The used hardware can be hit or miss. When buying "experienced" hardware I always tell people to buy what they know. > Is Debian an okay distribution to run on something like that? And > which flavor, AMD64? Debian is a *great* OS to run on those machines. I run Debian on many different racked production servers. In particular the advantage is that Debian Stable is production stable with security upgrades for about two years. That is a perfect time span for me personally for production stable servers. Not too short. Not too long. The Goldilocks zone. The new standard that has emerged is amd64. Definitely go with amd64 if you have 4G or 8G of ram and have been waffling. But I assume you are asking about hardware support. Generally this is less of a concern for the rack mount hardware because the video requirements are minimal since you won't be running an X server. You won't be using the audio. The only important item is the Gig ethernet. That will be an unknown. But so far in rack motherboards I have yet to hit a bad Gig-E device. If it is an Intel motherboard with on-board networking it will very likely be an e1000 and that is very well supported. Don't worry about Hyperthreading. You have real cores and so don't need fake cores. Real cores are much better than fake ones. I personally would check that the cpus support VT-x for hardware virtualization. Because KVM and others such as VirtualBox can be a useful feature on a machine. Take the Intel E5430 cpu for example. Look that up on the Intel site. Scroll down and find the VT-x field. It says "Yes" it is supported. It should be good to go. http://ark.intel.com/products/33081/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5430-12M-Cache-2_66-GHz-1333-MHz-FSB By comparison look at an Intel E5400. I happen to know that one is a No. Look it up. If it doesn't say Yes then it means No. So be careful with the cpus if you want to play with virtualization. http://ark.intel.com/products/40478/Intel-Pentium-Processor-E5400-2M-Cache-2_70-GHz-800-MHz-FSB I avoid using an onboard raid controller unless you have a spare one. If the motherboard dies then you pretty much need another identical raid controller to be able to salvage data from the drives. Because the hardware raid on-disk formats are not standardized and every vendor does it differently. But software raid works well and works everywhere. A large company with a lot of hardware is better off with hardware raid. But a single machine isolated in a SOHO environment without spares is better off using software raid. And I am just assuming that you would want to use raid since this is a server machine. > Don't ask me what I'm going to actually *do* with it when I get it > up and running, I just want to see if I *can* get it running and > stable, with Linux and maybe a spare XP Pro (32-bit) license I have. > Then run Seti or protein-folding workloads on it until I get bored > and move on to another project :-) The advantage to server quality hardware will be things like ECC ram and other server components. But it won't be faster. Due to the age of the machine it will be slower than newer machines. But it will have 8 cores and that is fun. A feature I absolutely love is having remote console ability. The HP Compaq iLO remote console for example is awesome. But getting a machine that has a remote console adds a premium to the cost. If it lives at your house then this isn't worth it. If it lives in a data center then it is an awesome feature. Before you buy a 1U rack server I will ask one thing. Are you aware of just how loud those machines happen to be? They are *LOUD*. They are "you don't want them in your house" loud. Maybe in the garage. Better in a shed not attached to the house. They are loud. Some servers have a BIOS option to allow running fans at a slower speed. If it has that option then select it. With that option they are sometimes not so bad. If no BIOS fan option then if you take the lid off and put a house fan on them you can unplug most of the small 1-inch high speed fans and probably reduce the noise by half while still keeping the cpus within an acceptable temperature range. Additionally power consumption of those machines can be very high. Depending upon the hardware and and other factors more than 150 watts is almost certain. Probably less than 350 watts. But I wouldn't be surprised to see 270 watts from a dual 4-core Xeon. If you heat your house with electric heat then this doesn't matter. Until it gets hot in the summer. Before thinking about this type of server for a non-racked non-data center home you might consider getting a new small office machine. For example I have several buddies who have bought one of these SOHO deskside servers and they all gave it good reviews. I don't have one myself but I have been thinking it would be a good machine for a home server. HP ProLiant N40L Ultra Micro Tower Server System AMD Turion II Neo N40L 1.5GHz 2-Core 2GB http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16859107052 Something to think about. You are wanting to have fun and I don't want to talk you out of it. I just want you to go in with your eyes wide open and your earplugs ready. :-) Good luck and have fun! If you end up with something interesting I would enjoy reading a report from you about what you did and how it turned out for you. Bob
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