Daemon News '200002' : '"Planning Your New Box "'

DæmonNews: News and views for the BSD community

Planning Your New Box

Brennan Stehling brennan.offwhite.net

If you are into computers and love working with them, the best feeling is planning your next box. What OS do you want to put on it? How much disk space will you get? What processor should you buy? If you are a home user you have a wide range of options. If you are building a file server for use at the office, your range of options becomes more narrow.

To start out, you should decide what the primary use of the new computer will be. If it is a home box you will likely want X Windows with a web browser and the ability to play games, which requires compatible sound and video cards. If it destined to be a server, you can leave out the sound card and stick to a basic video card.

I have personally been involved in planning and building several computers and have installed various versions of Linux and FreeBSD. They all had a different purpose. A couple were for workstations and the rest were meant to be servers. After a couple years of experience I have learned a few things which have helped me in planning for my next box.

In my case I wanted to replace my old server which I built back in early 1999. I built it for less than $900. It is a Pentium II 350 with 64megs of RAM and a 8.5 Gig IDE hard-drive. The machine is on a network and serves up websites with Apache. It has been a good little server, but as my needs have grown, it is not enough. I want a faster machine with a current version of the OS. My server OS of choice is FreeBSD. I want improved performance for Java and cryptography for the next server because I have been dabbling in OpenSSL and Java Servlets lately.

First off, let's make a list of necessary items for a server and for a home computer. To be more specific, I will detail two servers, a file server and a web server along with a home workstation used for playing games and playing mp3 music. I will explain the configuration of each one below.

File Server:
Fast Processor (Intel or AMD)
Motherboard
Memory (128 megs or more)
System Disk (SCSI)
RAID drive (hardware drive)
Video Card (built-in or generic)
Network Card (3Com)
CD-ROM
Floppy Drive

Web Server:
Fast Processor (Intel or AMD)
Motherboard
Memory (128 megs or more)
System Disk (SCSI)
Export Disk (IDE)
Video Card (built-in or generic)
Network Card (3Com)
CD-ROM
Floppy Drive

Home Workstation:
Decent Processor (Intel or AMD)
Motherboard
Memory (32 megs or more)
System Disk (IDE)
Export Disk (IDE)
Video Card (anything nice and compatible)
Sound Card (Sound Blaster)
Modem
CD-ROM
Floppy Drive

One key difference between the home and server machines is the internet connection. If you happen to be lucky enough to have DSL at home you may need a network card instead of the modem, but generally you will be going over the conventional phone line for dial-up internet access. If you do not plan on going online at all you do not need either.

The only other key difference is the drive configuration. For all systems I recommend a system disk for the base install of the system. That is where you will place your boot and swap partitions and the rest of your system files; that will be a busy drive. Then you will need much more space for your various other files. If you have that on a different physical disk you will notice a performance benefit because you will be using a different read/write head than your system drive. The more heads you have reading and writing to your filesystem the better.

For the home system you can use all IDE drives, and those are cheap. You can get an IDE drive for over 20 gigs for well under $200 easily these days. You only need about 5 gigs for the system disk while the export disk can be any size you like. This configuration should make you quite happy at home. If you want more space in the future you can always go out and buy the next largest IDE drive to come out and add that to your system.

The servers may require SCSI drives. If you are running a web server, which I assume will be Apache, you will do fine with lots of physical memory and swap space on the fast system disk. With a fast SCSI drive you will have great performance. The export disk does not need to be SCSI since the web server will hold most of the content in physical memory or on the SCSI swap partition. Since IDE drives are so cheap and SCSI drives are so expensive you will do well using a fast system disk to do all your heavy lifting.

If your box is serving up files on a network to many client machines you cannot rely on a web server caching your content. Your disk heads will be very busy reading and writing to files all over the place. If they are not fast enough you will experience slow performance in the system. I recommend a RAID configuration because you want to have redundancy on such a system and you also have many heads reading and writing to your filesystem. You also want a hardware driven RAID drive so your system disk is not doing all the work to run a software driven RAID system. If you do not feel a RAID system is necessary, you may do fine with a few SCSI drives. At least you will have one head for the system disk and one for each SCSI drive.

Your exact hard-drive configuration could be any variation between these three examples and a bit beyond. The most important thing is to give your system disk room to do it's work. If you are running a file server based on a large IDE drive you may see your server die due to kernel panics because it cannot swap out memory to disk fast enough as the disk head is busy on another part of the disk. Choosing your disk configuration is a science on it's own and it is best to just get more than you expect since your usage will likely grow anyway.

In order to install your OS of choice you will need at least a CD-ROM and possibly a floppy drive. Get any floppy drive that is cheap and get a well known and compatible brand for the CD-ROM. These two devices are well supported and should offer few headaches.

With a home system you will need a decent video card and a compatible sound card. Depending on your OS of choice, you will be limited to a select number of hardware vendors for sound support. Check the various sites listed below for hardware information. You can generally select a well known brand safely.

For a sound card, get a real Sound Blaster card from Creative Labs, not a cheap clone like Compaq or other OEM's like to make. Creative Labs is pretty well supported. It's like buying a 3Com ethernet card, but be sure you buy a compatible model. The newest models may not have driver support quite yet so bring a print-out listing of the sound cards which your OS supports. If it is listed you can feel good knowing that you will be able to get your card working right away.

Video cards are much simpler. A normal installation of your system will not need advanced graphics so any video card will work, but once you want to start using X Windows you will want a supported card. The number of supported cards is quite large, so odds are the card you choose will work, but be sure to check the supported list at the XFree86 web site. No matter what card you choose, be sure to get one with a decent amount of RAM. I have noticed they generally have well over 2 megs these days. Get a card with 8 megs if they have it. That will affect the possible resolution and color depth for X Windows.

Once you have decided on all of your parts, shop around. Get quotes online from places like Micro Warehouse or Price Watch. You can even purchase the parts online if they have a reasonable price, but only buy with a warranty. Most manufacturers, like Seagate, have at least a one-year manufacturer's warranty on their products.

I shopped around and found that Best Buy sells hard-drives and memory cheap while the local computer parts store sells them for much more. I purchased my motherboard and other necessary parts at the local computer parts store. They sold the processor and more of the other parts real cheap. If you are building a home system to play games, you may be able to afford a better video card if you save money on your processor, memory and hard-drives.

Then after you have planned your new box, bought your parts, assembled the machine and installed your glorious OS of choice you can give it a spin. After planning your new box down to the last device you should be happy with its performance.

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