Making a fast system
I've been using linux for a year or so now and I've become fairly familiar with the OS as a whole. However, now I'm tackling a new challenge.
I would like to take an older machine I have (a pentium 75 with 50 meg ram) and turn it into a formidable server machine, capable of running qmail, apache, php, and mysql at a minumum. My question is: what is the best way to go about this? Is that even possible with a machine that old? What tweaks can I perform that might make the machine capable of handling such a load? I've heard many success stories of people turning older machines into something worth keeping around, and now I'm curious to see if I can do it myself. (with help of course :) ) Thanks very much in advance. |
I am running a BIND DNS server with Fedore Core 2 on a 100 Mhz Pentium 1 with 128 megs of RAM. In text mode, the machine really is relatively snappy. I would sugest that you try to find some extra ram to put into that sytem, as it is extremely cheap to come by now. I would not consider running on any less than 96 megs. I have run Redhat 7.3 in graphical mode on a Pentium 1 100 with 96 megs of ram however.
I am sure that the guys here will have a bunch of optimization suggestions, but I just wanted to share my experience with getting old machines do new tricks. |
Although that sort of hardware certainly can handle all of the services you mention don't expect it to be a speed demon. PHP with MySQL queries is not all that light and fast on that sort of hardware, and if you're going to run mail filtering (for spam and viruses) that will take a huge hit on performance.
As for "tweaks", the best way IMHO is to start out with a very basic system. Only add the services and applications you will use. Distributions like Gentoo, Debian and Slackware are ideal for creating "light" servers. And don't even think about installing X - a server never needs a GUI (take that, Windows! ;)). Håkan |
comps these days can go for like 400 dollars and itll be pretty nice. Get that scap ur machine.
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I'd go with a DeLi or another Slackbased distro, or Slack itself. NetBSD and OpenBSD are always good choices. There are a lot of distros that run quite well on old machines.
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Thanks for the suggestions. I've been using slackware pretty much exclusively and I really like it.
Are there any specific kernel compilation options that someone might reccomend that would make the machine a bit more responsive? |
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=deli. This distro is Slackware based and is designed to run fast, with X, on 486-Pentuim 166.
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