I'm setting up a simple web server at home with Mandriva 2005LE(I just know Mandriva the best so I'm going to use it), and want to see if I will have any large issues with the hardware I've chosen before I go an piece it together.

The idea here is to be economical without skimping on the cruical parts.

I already have an Athlon XP 2000+ CPU, so that will be what I build around.

Motherboard: ABIT NF7-S2 Nvidia nforce 2 chipset

Video: Asus GeForce FX 5200

Ram: 512 mb Crucial registered ECC

Storage: New Hitachi 80gb ATA
Backup: Used Seagate 80gb ATA

Optical: Old Sony DVD+RW

Any thoughts? What should I change? Should I go for SATA? How much trouble do you think I'll have setting this hardware up, as in will I have to scour the web for drivers for this and that?

Thanks, any critique would be welcome.

for the longest time I ran my home webserver a dual 350mhz box, so your processor should not be bottleneck of your system unless you're constantly running intense scripts (inefficient ones at that).

SATA is really not necessary on a webserver, if you're looking to upgrade your disks go with SCSI because of its reputation for reliability and speed. For just a home webserver this probably wouldn't be cost justified.

Since you're running it on linux (my first dual 350 server was on windows [boo hiss]) I suspect that your performance will be fine. I really suspect that you won't have any issues with performance, but you didn't give us much information at all about what you plan to use the webserver for. If it helps at all, here's a list of the webservers that I've run from home for various reasons http://u13.u13.net/

some more information about what you intend to use it for would be most kind

Shouldn't have a problem here, but you might need to have a kernel that is compiled specifically for AMD processors in order to have the best performance. (Don't know if Mandriva does this already; I use FC3.) But no, shouldn't have a problem there.

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Motherboard: ABIT NF7-S2 Nvidia nforce 2 chipset

As far as I know the Nvidia nforce 2 chipset is supported in recent kernels - you should be able to get DMA working on it - but you may need a kernel recompile in order to do that.

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Video: Asus GeForce FX 5200

If you are going to run the machine as a webserver, you might consider running it in textmode only. However, as far as I know, Nvidia provides Linux drivers for all its GPU's, and the FX 5200 is an older GPU, so you should have no problems. My FX5900 works perfectly with the latest Nvidia drivers.

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Ram: 512 mb Crucial registered ECC

More than enough methinks - how many users you going to have coming into the server? We have a tiny, ancient 300mHz machine with 128MB (!) here that we use for back-office development and testing, with three people working on it, (it has RH9 on) and it performs just fine.

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Storage: New Hitachi 80gb ATA Backup: Used Seagate 80gb ATA

Shouldn't have problems there - most recent kernels have ATA / S-ATA support compiled in.

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Optical: Old Sony DVD+RW

Again most likely no problems - the latest growisofs should handle it nice through K3B or something similar.

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Any thoughts? What should I change? Should I go for SATA?

Naw - as far as I know the only difference between ATA and SATA is speed - your specs seem more than suffiecient already.

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How much trouble do you think I'll have setting this hardware up, as in will I have to scour the web for drivers for this and that?

Nope, this spec list seems pretty plain-vanilla - you should get it going quite painlessly, with maybe a kernel recompile (if you can stomach one) to get the best performance (i. e. if you absolutely must have DMA, for example, and the board's support is not compiled into your particular kernel)

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Thanks, any critique would be welcome.

Hey, no problem.

That was excellent. I was actually just looking through a local computer store and found their cheapest hardware that I could wrap around that CPU so I think it will be just fine.

I'm planning on hosting multiple personal sites for family members, Some will be more active than others. I just want the bottleneck to be the internet connection( ~700kbps DSL UP speed), not the server's hardware.

you could use a 133mhz with 64MB of RAM and the connection would still be your bottleneck. I have an old 133MHz laptop with 80MB RAM under my bed at college which I use for some local testing, and it runs fine as a webserver. Locally I can see speeds from it which are only limited by the speed and usage of the hard drive (old, slow, small)

You're not going to have any issues ;-)

I have to agree. I have a site co-hosted with about 500 others on an Athlon XP 2000+ and 512mb of RAM. We use php and mysql and the server still jumps to action without hesitation (running FreeBSD). You'll be fine.