Joseph Hesse wrote:
On 05/16/2014 10:28 AM, Dave Stevens wrote:
Quoting Joseph Hesse joehesse@gmail.com:
I want to build a lightweight server and install centos. Does anyone have a recommendation for a suitable motherboard?
there are lots of motherboards that might do; in my experience make sure it has lots of top end for memory, 32 gigs is not hard to find. you also need to consider how many cpus cores drives other peripherals. really it's a large topic. check ebay too, I found a nice supermicro two cpu opteron board with 8 cores and 16G ram for $250.
I am currently using, as a server, a workstation computer. It was built with a gigabyte motherboard and has 8G ram and a 1000G Sata 3 drive.
It is accessed with ssh and runs an ftp server, a web server and a samba server so my wife can back up her pc to it. It is running behind a router.
This computer more than meets my needs as a lightweight server except the hardware is dying and I want to replace it.
The question in my mind is: should I just buy another workstation class motherboard and duplicate what I already have or buy a motherboard which is intended to be used as a server?
You *really* don't need a real server. Note that my idea of a "real" server is rackmount, has two or four physical CPUs with anywhere from 8 (used to be 4) to 16 cores each, and 8G? Everything here has at least 64G (used to be 32G, though there were some 10-yr-old compute nodes with less). The workstation you have - do you find it under a heavy load? Do you or your wife feel that it's not responsive enough? If no, then just replace what you have. I rebuilt my home system early this year, with a Gigabyte m/b, 8G RAM. Got a little crazed, so it's got 2 1TB h/ds as Linux software RAID 1, and for $30 I bought a hot-swap drive bay to fit in the case, and a 2TB drive to put in there for offline backups, like I do at work....
mark "really do gotta set up samba for my wife & the kid"