Making, setting up, and maintaining your own server?

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Hey guys, I have a few questions for anyone who has done anythgin with servers! This is for a project that I have to accomplish in school, so far Google turns up countless irrelevent results. So any help is greatly appreciated.

Ok, the first thign is, what are servers mainly used for? I know that they can be for websites, but I don't see the point in having a machine that has two CPUs and loads of RAM and a few HDDs just for a website that's only a few MB in space, if not less. So, what is the purpose of a server? What is it's function?

What kind of HDDs can you use in a server? What is the amount of space a HDD should have in a server? What kinds of HDD can be used in the server? Which are in your opinion, considered the best, in all aspects of the meaning, "best".


What kind of processing power does a server need? A high frequency Xeon or an Opteron? How much RAM do you need in a server?
 
The ones that I run are Exchange and File Servers. Exchange servers are for holding a companies email. It essentially gives you a centralized location to maintain and administor the emails. Each employee accesses the server when they open their email. A file server is one where all the data you want available to all employees is held. This, again, is just a centralize location for saving common files.

As far as HDs go, you can put in IDE, SATA, and SCSI. I have three SCSI HDs in a chain setup with RAID 5. You normally want more than one HD so you have redundancy in case on HD fails. As far as size goes depends on how much you want to store. My three HDs are 73 Gb and with the RAID 5 setup I have 146 Gb available to save the info. SCSI and SATA HDs are also faster than IDEs. The reason SCSI is good is because you can have up to 16 devices in the chain although you will probably never need this many.

CPU, I have a Xeon and RAM I only have 512MB. The more RAM and better CPU you have the better the server will respond to requests. If you have 500 employees accessing a server you would want more. I only have to worry about 30 employees max. at one time. Normally only up to 10 employees at a time is the norm and these specs are satisfactory to support this. Again, this is all dependent on what you are trying to support.
 
Thanks for the information.

So a server doesn't really need a lot of space, and they really don't do much, except respond to request and send out little packets of very basic information, such as email. So a fast HDD isn't really necessary? I would liek to get a SCSI drive, because they're fast, and in a RAID 5 configuration you get a lot of backing up, not to mention a RAID 50 would be nice, although incredibly expensive! :D
 
pretty much. Along with that thought they are used for profile management. This is helpful for managing users and not having to specify each persons permissions on each machine. They log in via the server and their profile is all set up.

As I think of more I will let you know. Hope this helps
 
What about game servers. I duno anything about them but i think they are prity much the same. They take imformation from 1 player an distribute it to other players. Not sure if thats right, i am stupid.
 
well there are many kinds of servers...
depends on which kind of server you want to know about...
i can help with the web hosting servers though...

webhosting servers don't mainly only host 1 website... there are servers that host hundreds of websites and therefore they need lots of disk space...
a lot of processing power is needed too if the websites that the server hosts contain a lot of scripts just to reduce the processing time and to make the websites load faster
about ram... ram also helps in the processing of scripts and making websites load fast if thay have a lot of traffic visiting them

the types of hard disks preferred are the S-ATA and SCSI types for their speed
most web hosting servers have Intel Pentium 4 processors or Intel Celeron Processors for their capability of high duty work
 
JustinMcG67 said:
Ok, the first thign is, what are servers mainly used for? I know that they can be for websites, but I don't see the point in having a machine that has two CPUs and loads of RAM and a few HDDs just for a website that's only a few MB in space, if not less. So, what is the purpose of a server? What is it's function?

Servers are mainly used for the following:
Gaming servers (for hosting games)
Storage servers (for public FTP's and such)
Web servers (for hosting websites)

Why the great hardware? Well...loads of hard drives? As someone else said they do store data for sometimes thousands of websites all from one machine, this is why the RAM is needed as well...these thousand websites could each be getting 100 unique hits a day...which is more dealing with the necessity of having a great connection. Dual CPU's? Alot of servers don't have those usually...but the some that do are for sites like google, and gaming servers that need to process everything as fast as possible.


JustinMcG67 said:
What kind of HDDs can you use in a server? What is the amount of space a HDD should have in a server? What kinds of HDD can be used in the server? Which are in your opinion, considered the best, in all aspects of the meaning, "best".

You can use any kind of hard drives in a server, SCSI, IDE, SATA, doesn't really matter they will all still run, a server is really a computer doing a different job.

In my Opinion SCSI (Pronounced Scuzzy) and SATA are the best for servers, you do not want IDE hard drives in there slowing down the speed of data access.

The amount of space needed? Depends on how many customers you are going to have, a small dedicated usually has about 40-80GB which is alot when you are talking about a gaming server or a webserver because usually you offer a customer 2GB space at most if it is a shared hosting account.

JustinMcG67 said:
What kind of processing power does a server need? A high frequency Xeon or an Opteron? How much RAM do you need in a server?

Some servers run on Athlon 64's! Even ones as low as 3000+. Opteron in my opinion is best, dual core opterons, or just dual opterons. Xeons are...err, not that great at all.

Servers usually have a minimum of 512MB RAM, any less...isn't very good.

Hope this helps clear things up.
 
Then there is DNS, DHCP, HTTP, SMTP, FTP, etc...

Our project in class right now is to setup our own linux network with all the servers listed above, then build our own firewall to stop the DHCP from sending our local IP's to the whole school.

Servers usually have lots of RAM to make everything run smooth and fast.
 
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