give me hardware specs

[philosophia]

If this is a production server, I would go with redundancy, definately some sort of RAID array (1 or 5) at minimum, maybe a tape drive (unless you can back it up over the network). I would I'll second the vote for fast (7,600rpm or better) SCSI drives, hotswappable if you can get them. You definately should go with a RAID controller. I cannot stress that enough. As for video card, who cares. You shouldn't run X at all. I just take whatever comes with the server. You don't want less than a 133Mhz bus.

Whether or not you want to use dual processors or a ton of RAM depends on what apache is going to be serving. For web apps or a SQL server that processes a ton of transactions, you'll need more system resources. If you're going to serve static pages to a limited audience, and only run apache, you don't really need that much hardware. Also, unless you have a huge MySQL database, how much drive space could you need? Not much at all. You'll have maybe two users on the box, root and a less privledged user. And, if you're MySQL database is really that large, I would drop it on a second box dedicated to that job alone.

Choose the right box for the job. If this is for production you need to plan for maximum uptime and disaster recovery as much as anything else.

I guess the question is, how many hits do you currently get per day? What exactly will your MySQL server be doing? Are you going to offer ftp or anything else that would necessitate tons of storage? You really need to sit down and capacity plan based upon what you now offer, how it fails at its job, and what you like to offer. Don't buy too much just cause you can. It's a waste.

it's a webserver serving up about 10 gig of html files, database apps, and possibly streaming media. it gets about 100000 hits a day. we also need ftp.

[philosophia]

NIC bondage.... imagine the power... Now what about my consultants fee... I want that GFX card !

i thought the deal was we buy you a gfx card if you can convert our mac/filemaker pro database apps to php/mysql

i thought the deal was we buy you a gfx card if you can convert our mac/filemaker pro database apps to php/mysql

Oh... yes sire... and do you have any seas you want parted too ??

Do your own damn dirty work...

Oh my god... you're not serious are you... I was only kidding d00d...

[tolstoy]

it's a webserver serving up about 10 gig of html files, database apps, and possibly streaming media. it gets about 100000 hits a day. we also need ftp.

So in other words you need a fat ass machine. I'd be psyched. What are the specs of your curent machine? Can you use its performance as some sort of bench mark? If you have a ton of small database transactions (read/writes) I would go with a raid 5 array, though simple striping without parity would probably give you the fastest performance. You probably want the fastest drives you can get. And I'm also going to second the vote for at least dual Gig processors and at least 1 gig of RAM though you may want to go higher. Storage all depends on what you anticipate your growth potential to be over say a year or so. Do you allow people to upload to ftp or just download? I have no clue how intensive streaming meadi can be, though I would guess its more bandwidth intensive than hardware intensive, though I could be wrong. Really these are all shots in the dark, as I have never dealth with a webserver that takes heavy activity. Like I said, I would start by looking at the performance of your current box and then planning from there.

Maybe you should ask your boss what his upward spending limit is and see what that will buy you.

[Schotty]

For a production box of that voulme get at least a dual-p3 class system at at least 500Mhz and by the volume you are talking about, Id say 1GB of ram should suit you fine, but allow yourself room to expand in the future. You do not need dual nics unless you are also running a proxy on it (bad idea, eats up an ungodly amount of ram for fast reliable access). RAID on the SCSI order is an absolute necessity. SCSI is faster and more reliable than IDE will ever be. For data that is constantly changing, a mirrored stripe is a GREAT idea. Dont look like an idiot when a drive pukes out, and reverting to day old data.

At work a dual p2-266 w/512 pc66 is sufficient to run an Oracle 7 DB and do EDI order generation over a JavaScrpt/HTML interface. We use Netscape as the server (heh, it works odly enough....) Other than the fact it runs on NT, it is set up okay. The order DB is critical, and due to that the 3 RAIDed discs are also mirrored onto another single fast fast drive. With no more than 45 people on at once - ever - it handles the task sufficeinetly. Only due to the RAM and extra proc. Of course for US, a Linux solution would prove overkill for the hardware 15 Users now are not taxing the box in the slightest. Age is