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Alfons

Fri Feb 10 2006, 11:09PM

Registered Member #134 Joined: Fri Feb 10 2006, 10:44PM
Location: Belgium
Posts: 86

Hi,

I'd like to transform one of my computers to a simple webserver, but I was wondering what the minimal hardware- and software-requirements are for a simple but decent server.

That is:

processor speed
RAM
HD
OS
other stuff

Any ideas?

Eric

Fri Feb 10 2006, 11:26PM

Registered Member #69 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 07:42AM
Location:
Posts: 116

It depends what you want to serve. Do you want to run asp, php, database stuff? Unless you have some active content that'll take lots of processor, the most basic machine imagineable with say ~256MB RAM, a NIC, a few GB disk, running linux/apache would work fine.

Alfons

Fri Feb 10 2006, 11:53PM

Registered Member #134 Joined: Fri Feb 10 2006, 10:44PM
Location: Belgium
Posts: 86

Eric wrote ...

It depends what you want to serve. Do you want to run asp, php, database stuff? Unless you have some active content that'll take lots of processor, the most basic machine imagineable with say ~256MB RAM, a NIC, a few GB disk, running linux/apache would work fine.

PHP and maybe some database stuff would be nice, but isn't necessary.

So in fact, my AMD Sempron 2600+ machine with 512MB RAM and 40GB HD would be enough?

Which Linux-distro do you recommend?

Simon

Sat Feb 11 2006, 12:09AM

Registered Member #32 Joined: Sat Feb 04 2006, 08:58AM
Location: Australia
Posts: 549

I would actually recommend FreeBSD, which isn't strictly Linux. It's powerful without the bloat - and very reliable.

Nik

Sat Feb 11 2006, 12:12AM

Registered Member #53 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 04:31AM
Location: Ontario, Canada
Posts: 638

My 350mhz Suse10 computer doubles as an FTP and HTTP server. It has ~300mb of ram, a 4gig drive for the OS and a 120gig drive for the FTP files. Its been running for 2 weeks straight now with no problems.

Liam

Sat Feb 11 2006, 01:27AM

Registered Member #113 Joined: Fri Feb 10 2006, 01:40AM
Location:
Posts: 49

I've used a 133 MHz 128 MB RAM boatanchor before and it actually was acceptable for static pages. Your AMD that you're talking about is incredible and will work for basically anything. The bottleneck is your connection to the internet which is, for me, cable so I can only get uploads of 40 kbps or so.

Dave Marshall

Sat Feb 11 2006, 02:11AM

Registered Member #16 Joined: Thu Feb 02 2006, 02:22PM
Location: New Wilmington, PA
Posts: 554

I have an apache/vsftpd server that serves the backup of my entire network so I can access my files from overseas and at work. Its a 500Mhz AMD K6, 390MB of ram and an 80gb drive. It also hosts a CGI-IRC client to let me skirt around port blocking. My upload bandwidth is severely lacking, capped at about 30kb/s but its quite sufficient for my own needs. I highly recommend Ubuntu for the distro.

Dave

Alfons

Sat Feb 11 2006, 09:29AM

Registered Member #134 Joined: Fri Feb 10 2006, 10:44PM
Location: Belgium
Posts: 86

Your AMD that you're talking about is incredible and will work for basically anything.

And I thought it was a very 'basic' machine for a server...

My upload bandwidth is severely lacking, capped at about 30kb/s but its quite sufficient for my own needs. I highly recommend Ubuntu for the distro.

I got a DSL connection with about 128kbps upload but I think my DSL provider provides a dynamic IP which, I heard, is quite a pain in the ass when you want to access your server from the internet.
For some reason, I just don't like Ubuntu (probably because it uses Gnome, but do I need a graphic shell for server?).

Does anyone know of a website or something with guidelines on how to setup FreeBSD or SUSE (or maybe even Ubuntu or Windows) to act as server-OS?

Dave Marshall

Sat Feb 11 2006, 04:45PM

Registered Member #16 Joined: Thu Feb 02 2006, 02:22PM
Location: New Wilmington, PA
Posts: 554

You can install KDE on Ubuntu, which basically makes it kubuntu. I dont use a GUI for my server at all, its just a terminal. I have a dynamic IP as well (standard for DSL it seems) there are ways to work around it, like DynDNS.

To setup Ubuntu as a server, you put the install CD in, when it boots to the install prompt you type Server. Once you've got it installed, you ensure you're online, edit your aptitude sources list to include the restricted depositories, then run apt-get update, then apt-get install apache2. You'll want an FTP server on it, I recommend VSFTPD. Its pretty simple to set up, and is very secure (hence the *vs*ftpd).

The Ubuntu wiki can walk you through getting apache and vsftpd to play nice.

Dave

krenshala

Sat Feb 11 2006, 05:11PM

Registered Member #143 Joined: Sat Feb 11 2006, 04:25PM
Location: Austin TX, NorAm, Sol III
Posts: 28

Until I set up my AMD64 3000 Shuttle system as my new webserver/mailserver/firewall (apache2/mysql/php) I was running everything on my dual pentium-133MHz system with 256Mb of memory. Other that large PHP scripts timing out (if they took too long to complete executition) it had no problems at all. The only reason I switched was because I was playing with the PHP/MySQL side of things and wanted to remove that processing bottleneck.

As for which OS to use, find someone local you trust that knows *nix/*BSD to help you set up your system. If you don't know anyone local pick a distro with good installation documentation. Personally, I started with Slackware (to make sure I learned as much as I could) and have recently switched over to Gentoo (typing this from an old P2-400 running Gentoo now

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