Next server

Saturday, October 29th, 2005

After getting a little extra money in the computer infrastructure budget for home, I’ve taken the bold step of upgrading from the current main server:

450 MHz Pentium III
400MB RAM
nVidia GeForce2 MX
200GB of hard disk (at about 55% capacity)
894 bogomips
Linux kernel 2.4.20
Redhat 9

To this somewhat more modern configuration:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ 1GHz FSB Socket 939 Dual Core Processor
4 GB of RAM
AOpen 91.05210.66U Geforce 6600 256MB DDR PCI Express x16 Video Card
.5 TB of hard disk

Well, as soon as it ships, I’ll be upgrading. I haven’t quite settled on which distro I’ll be using, but I plan on trying out Ubuntu, Gentoo, and Fedora. Maybe even Suse. Before this machine is pushed into service as the main server, it will have the luxury of being a clean slate that can dabble in many distros until it finds something suitable. Since work has offered to pay for my home office, there is a fair chance that I’ll end up with Redhat EL workstation (which is what I run on my desktop at work) after all my experiments. Experiments are fine, but when it comes down to day-to-day sysadmin tasks, I like everything to be the same.