[CentOS] Mother board recommendation

[m.roth at 5-cent.us]

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"