I am going to be building a web server to handle the demands of some of my websites. I plan on using Fedora since I am most accustom to that distribution, but am looking for recomendations on the motherboard mainly. Has anyone had any phenominal results with any certain motherboard for compatibility, performance, and such? The system will have a SATA 80GB HDD, ATI 9250, 460W PSU, CDROM, 512MB DDR PC3200 RAM. I am stuck between AMD and Intel... I currently have 5 Intel systems and 5 AMD systems... Many say AMDs run better on Linux but I notice no difference personally....

Depending upon the motherboard recommendation, I will adjust accordingly, however I do have a spare Intel Pentium 4 2.4C 800MHZ FSB lying around here that I could use if their a good motherboard that likes Linux or else I will probably purchase an AMD Sempron 2500+ or so....

any hardware recommendations are welcome...

IMHO, SATA is not a very good choice. The SATA drivers have been moved to libata and that makes them show up as SCSI devices. (/dev/sda , /dev/sdb, etc...)

hdparm can't set PIO or DMA modes on these "SCSI" drives, so if your performance is bad, and every one of my SATA machines runs pathetically, you can't do anything about it, at least until they get around to extending the ioctl() functions necessary to control ATA drives down through the entire SCSI stack.

I have no idea why they decided to mainstream libata before it was complete, but they did. I have wriitten the developer, Jeff Garzik, but have not gotten a reply as yet. I'm not holding my breath, I'm buying some cheap ATA drives instead.

As far as mobo's go, I have had pretty good luck with the I865 series.

to be blunt for a web server would you not be better off with a RAID configuration and SCSI drives?

that is unless you are hosting for a small business that sees less then 1000 hits a day then IDE or sATA will be just fine.

as for AMD vs Intel, its a money thing. both run well, but you do get more performance for your money on an AMD system vs Intel. that is the reason for the most part i only buy AMD as i can get more power for my limited budget.

as for MBs, i personally like just about every Epox that has been released. Asus used to be top of my line, but they have been releasing onboard stuff that will not work in *nix, at least not until the board has been out for sometime.

when the Asus P4P800 Deluxe first came out it was not supported by *nix, but now all features are supported in most current distros. yes that is for an intel chip, and was in fact the first 'gamers' board with sATA RAID 0, 1, 01 built in and a 10/100/1000 NIC.

i currently dual boot whitebox3 and winXP pro on that MB with my seagate 80G sATA drive and have better performance with Whitebox, then i do XP for over all system, boot, and other benchmark tests.

dual boot as i enjoy my MMORPG games, cant do that real well in *nix yet.

so it will depend on what you have in mind for traffic to that server. that should be your guiding line.

for a server that will be hosting multiple sites (more then 5) with plenty of traffic then sATA will not cut it. you will need SCSI. if you are just hosting a few personal web sites, then even a slower 5400rpm ATA drive will work just fine.

for servers go scsi. there seem to be a few sata drives around having scsilike layout, but sata imho isn't worth it *yet* & lifetime of scsi is much better.

afaik there are helpful posts at www.kerneltrap.org about the libata states.

agree, cpu brand doesn't make lot difference.

hits? what do you anticipate?

sl mritch.

Wel... so far for the month of November ive received 95,984,135 requests... for either pictures or pages or the few other file types on the server... Load time is very fast, its currently hosted independently from a hosting company in Texas thats on a BGP4 network.... The specs for the box is a CELERON with I beleive 1GB of RAM and IDE hard drives. I hand coded all of the pages and they rely on XML and also MYSQL databases called through PHP. I would be more open to investing in a bit more money, except I just don't want to find out that it ends up being slower than my current hosting solution, either due to poor configuration of Apache or the T1 line.... I am considering going with an AMD Socket 939 64bit, sicne it would only cost like $80 more and it will also last longer.... If I go with SCSI its like $120 for a 36GB hard drive plus I would need to buy a SCSI controller, with a 80GB IDE 8MB Cache its like $85, so I could almost buy 2 x 80GB IDE hard drives for the price of the SCSI setuo, and throw the 2 hard drives into RAID.

Any other comments welcome

well with that amount of hits, SCSI and RAID will definatly give you much better performance. as for bandwidth, that is depending on what you are hosted on now.

if the host company has multiple T1, or T3 or better, then you single T1 will be SLOWER, that has nothing to do with the server or the software you will be building on that server.

64bit vs xeon is a toss atm, as Intel really put some money and effort into the xeon line to get the performance up so they would not lose their only real hold on the market. that is servers with multiple CPUs.

as for the life span of the 64bit chip that is not true. AMD has said that when they release the 2nd gen 64bit chip, it will not be backwards compatable with what you have today. this will require new ram, mb, and cpu for an upgrade. so go with what will give you the most power for the money you are willing to spend.

IIRC RAM and seek time on the HDs will be hammered more then the CPU on a web server anyways. you can save a bit on the CPU, spend more on the ram and hd setup and still come out with a powerful server.

yes SCSI are much more expensive then IDE or sATA drives for the storage amount, but they offer what only SCSI can offer. that is the ability to have multiple hits to both read and write at the exact same time and not see a performance degrigation. IDE and sATA can not touch this.

also to top it off if you stick with Seagate for your SCSI drives you are looking at a harddrive that will concievably last 7-10 years or more before it will have to be replaced. baring any kind of outside damage like power surge or being dropped, etc...

that server of yours is getting hit very hard. you will need some real power to deal with that amount of hits.

im waiting on a friend of mine who just started renting a new office building and they'll be getting a new internet connection about January.... Hoping for a really good T1 line from the looks of it right now... When I get a more definite answer on the Internet I will probably decide but Im looking at a A64 probably and 1 x 36GB SCSI HDD

Im not a n00b at comp hardware just am still n00bish at times wit linux...

hardware is hardware as long as it is complient with the HCL of the OS.

if you know windows, and how the system is hit on the resource side, it should be close to the same on the *nix side. the biggest advantage will be that *nix will handle the load better and use more resources for the services and less for the OS.

yea... i was just concered about performance and compatibility.. like with SATA drives

For a high traffic website, I'll echo Lleb_Kcir's advice to go with SCSI and RAID. -- J.W.

First ill prolly use a 500Mhz Celeron box for like an hour and just do some small testing to see the load times... and if the times are reasonable for being on a celeron i will prolly build a better server box.. with SCSI raid instead of IDE or just a single SCSI drive

just to give you some compairson.

i ran apache on my laptop a P4m 1.8 with 256M pc133 ram and 5400rpm drive.

i had about 15 people in my LAN pull up my IP on the lan and start holding down their F5 key to refresh the page and get as many hits as i could in a known time frame. with 15 people hammering my system like that my CPU never got about 21% usage, ram was high, and my HD never stopped buzzing, but i was able to deal with the traffic. dont know if i could of kept up that level for hours on end, but with linux and apache that 500 maybe enough. i personally hate celeron chips but that is because of the gimped FSB.