Joseph Hesse wrote: > On 05/16/2014 10:28 AM, Dave Stevens wrote: >> Quoting Joseph Hesse <joehesse at 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"