Tweaking Windows 2003 Services / Settings for more RAM

[ziggo0]

I've looked at some XP guides...i've disabled alot of things to get some more ram, but is there any 'special' tweaks you guys @ ocforums know of? I need every mb of ram on this one :)

[klingens]

The best tweaks for a Windows server start with "Go to www.debian|gentoo.org and download the latest version of it..." ;)

Cut down on screen res and colors as much as you can. Install a minimal explorer replacement like litestep, geoshell of blackbox4win. Or set cmd.exe for your shell

[ziggo0]

Well it originally was running Slackware 10, i couldnt get it to run as an internet gateway. IP Masqu...w/e its spelled lol, im not the biggest on linux. Although it would be nice...more ram would be saved.

The server is running headless, so its just going to be accessed by http, ftp, and Remote Desktop, although i noticed by Remote Desktop it eats some serious ram..

[klingens]

There is no "headless" with Windows. The GUI will _always_ run. Can you run Windows on a PC without a videocard? I don't think so. Linux won't care at all, it will happily give you a serial console too.

Since you already managed to get slack installed, can I interest you in Debian? Get Debian sarge and install it. Then "apt-get install ipmasq dnsmasq" and you have a working internet gateway with NAT and caching DNS server. If you want it to act as a DHCP server, you need to edit a well commented /etc/dnsmasq.conf file a bit. That's all. And installing apache, php, mysql, proftpd,etc is similar to installing ipmasq.
I ran a Debian internet gateway on a 486-160 with 64MB RAM. It had a mailserver with imapd, samba, ftpd and a barebones apache (no php). sshd, irc client. It still had about 16-32MB RAM free depending what I did with it. the irc client used the most of the RAM even.

[ziggo0]

Well, by 'headless' i ment without Monitor, Keyboard and Mouse after proper installation & use of Remote Desktop. Sorry, i shall be more detailed next time.

What I really need in the Linux OS is Stabilty, Speed, and Less Resource Usage. Now i know this doesnt sound like much to ask for out of Linux but its what I need. The server i plan on running eats ram like Chocolate infront of a sweet tooth baby. eAthena - A Ragnarok Online Server Emulator, the map-server.exe eats ram very quicly...so i need to spare every bit of the 512mb I can. I know linux will eat less ram but i simply could never get it to act as an internet gateway (router). Does Debian eat more resources then Slack?

[klingens]

It's the same codebase, so you can slim then down to about the same. Debian doesn't need a GUI, slack doesn't need a GUI. Debian doesn't install anything by default from the bootfloppies if you don't want to. I always install from a 38MB ISO image which is just enough to get me on the internet, nothing more. No GUI, no servers whatsoever and almost no client software either. Very very barebones. Then I add whatever I need like ipmasq in the example above.

Currently my server uses roughly 64MB from 256. If I stopped irssi, amavsd-new and gkrellmd it would use less than 32MB. working as a samba server, apache2/ftp server, internet gateway with PPPoE, running a mailserver and imap server and several minor things.Stability you definitely get with Debian, no one ever complained about that with it. Speed: less programs running mean less programs need CPU time. Also the Linux tcp stack is considered a fast one. Ressource usage: I could run the above things on my old 486. I don't want to since disk access for the imap server would take so long (no DMA on that old chipset), but I know it would be possible.

[ziggo0]

Thanks for your help. I need to go get blank cd's and download the ISO's. Another question or two...

Will Debian support my two LAN cards? Just a generic on board Intel Chipset one and a LinkSys 10/100.

...and ill need Apache 2, MySQL 4.1.11 (at least), Probaly Pure-FTP (or whatever is most convient), Thats about it...it shouldnt be that hard to install/get working. I have no floppys so a bootable ISO would be the way to go :D

[klingens]

If slack did, then debian will too. But as I said: you want Debian sarge with a 2.6 kernel on this CD. No Debian Woody 3.0 and no kernel 2.4 either. Tho the 2.4 one might be able to recognize them.

http://cdimage.debian.org/pub/cdimage-testing/daily/i386/rc3/

[klingens]

Just looked, apache2 2.0.53, mysql-server 4.1.11 and pure-ftpd are all available. Debian has the biggest official package selection of all Linux distros usually (more than 10000 packages in official repositories)