system specs opinion.

ok so i have a few older motherboards and cpus lieing around and i want to setup a more advanced network at a low cost. what i want to do is setup my abit BP6 with 2 celleron 500s and 512mb of ram with linux and set it up as a resource server. id like to set it up to act like a fileserver/gateway for my network. running DHCP, DNS, NAT, SAMBA, and a few other basic services. what im tring to acomplish is have a central location for all my share files that i can access from my HTPC aswell as my other computers that will be booted into linux or windows at any given time. ill be useing it to store tv recordings, mp3's, and such things and also use it as a gateway system to the internet. for these basic functions do you think that it will be able to perform up to snuf. as all i will need to add is a video card and large hard drive to get it all working.

i also plan to use my AXP2100+ system as an HTPC ill be adding 2 haupage pvr 150s, an old soundblaster live with digital output to connect to my yamaha surround sound head unit. it has currently 256mb of ram that im planing up upgrade to 1.5gb. and its got a 120gb hard disk atm.

so do you think that with this hardware it will be able to perform the functions i described fairly well?

I ran a celeron 400 with 256 megs of ram as a DHCP, DNS, Samba, and Apache server without any stuttering from it. I think the dual 500's would prove no problem at all with that. might want to up the ram a little more in my opinion. otherwise i don't see anything wrong with that setup

yea i might bump the ram up abit since i plan for it to be serving some rather large video recordings around my network. i figured it would be suitable however id still like to hear a few more opinions. and also what distro would be recomended. ive been running suse 10.1 on most of my computers but honetly its kinda bloated and you can see it in yast when tring to add packages or save system changes. i want something with a minimal of gui garbage that still has some good graphical tools to setup my servers.

ssjwizard said:

yea i might bump the ram up abit since i plan for it to be serving some rather large video recordings around my network. i figured it would be suitable however id still like to hear a few more opinions. and also what distro would be recomended. ive been running suse 10.1 on most of my computers but honetly its kinda bloated and you can see it in yast when tring to add packages or save system changes. i want something with a minimal of gui garbage that still has some good graphical tools to setup my servers.

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Have you looked into Zenwalk? It's Slack-based, very light, and comes with XFCE as default. Also, Arch may be good if you want just a base system..it's too stripped for my needs/abilities, but it sounds like it may what you're looking for. Slack 11 or Debian 3.1 may be good too.
I used the Debian netinstall, and it was a snap. There is probably a preconfigured package option just for what you need. (You can choose if you want desktop options (bloat) or stripped down server options.)

First: lose that videocard. Useless.
Even when you want to use good graphical tools to set up a server (where would such things exist under Linux anyways?)

The hardware is oversized for what you want. More RAM isn't necessary either, but I'd put in a Gbit network card otherwise you're limited to ~10MB/s fileserver transfer speeds. You can't fully use the card, but it's better than nothing, will probably move the bottleneck from NIC speeds to hdd speeds.

Any distro you want will run fine with that hardware, even the most "bloated" one.

loose what video card? i might upgrade to gigabit ethernet but that would require replacing more hardware. my network shouldnt be under that heavy stress where i see and imediate need to move up from my 100mbps ethernet to 1 gig. idk i might its only a small investment. but im still confused by your comment about loosing my video card.

i think ive decided i want to slap a SATA pci card into the file server and use one of my spare low capacity PATA drives as a boot drive and setup a software raid. however i think for cost sake ill probably just get a single 400gb drive to begin with and then add others when more funds are avalible to me. does that sound like a decent uprade stradigy. btw i chose software raid because i can setup a raid 5 this way without incuring the 230 dollar cost of a sata controller that supports raid 5 mode and ony requires a 25 dollar sata controler.

as all i will need to add is a video card

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That's a waste of money and electricity.

And a SATA RAID with 100MBit networking for a fileserver. priceless!
Hint: any drive you can currently buy will oversaturate your network card by the factor of 2 or 3.

im not saying that 100mbit is ideal im saying that its what i have, as mentioned i dont need an extremly high effeciancy its just for my home network, i may consider moving to 1gig later but im mostly waiting to upgrade for 10gBaseT hardware to become avalible since the iso standard for that was rattified this year.

I've had various mobo/processor combos running FreeBSD as a file / local webserver for years now in my apartment. Started with a single p3-600b with 512mb ram, went to a athlonxp 2000+ with 256mb of ram, and now it's a s754 sempron 3300+ running 256mb of ram. I stream 700mb avis from the network shares no problem, all while running seti in the background as well as apache w/ php etc.

Duallie celerons with 256mb of ram or more will be perfectly adequate for a firewall / gateway / samba combo.