[Herefordshire] Newbie Question: File Server

[Andrew Hodgson]

-----Original Message-----
From: herefordshire-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk on behalf of Julian Robbins
Sent: Thu 05/05/2005 11:09
 
>(quoted)  As for simple, I would personally find a Dell server in your environment a bit overkill.  For the >past three years I have used a really battered Compaq Deskpro P166 with 64mb of ram and 3gb of disk - I got >this from a computer fair in Worcester.)

>Its worth mentioning that you can use a low spec pc like this , but this  was probably with an older distro >or also possibly without a screen ie X.

Yes.

>If you can do without X you can really trim down the hardware required.
>But if you want an easier solution, with a screen and a recent linux like Fedora or SUSE etc you probably >need more like say at least a 1 GHz pc with at least 128 MB ram.
>What im saying is that as an advanced user you can eke much more out of a lowspec pc, but I would advise you >to get something a little faster as this will give you much more flexibility for not much more cost. A 1 GHz >pc will set you back £100 or so.

I really don't see the need for X on server machines - I usually run the server without a screen and connect via SSH to the machine and do the commands that way - the other thing is that if you have enabled services such as SWAT/Webmin, it can all be done via a web browser.  It was only when I started work at my current job I saw a server running X - I didn't even realise the server packages came with X as an option, as most of the other distros I had used had not installed X when you choose the server mode.

The packages I gave you in the previous example would all run on such hardware with no problem - none of them install X.  This is especially true for low user machines - i.e, up to 5 users.  The only thing the machine was sluggish on was running PHP code, and there were times I was a bit worried that it wouldn't recover from spikes in large mail loads - for this reason I couldn't run anything like Spamassassin on it as it was just too memory intensive.

On another tack, if X is installed on the server, what interfaces are people using to make config changes?

Thanks.
Andrew.
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