I hate to junk up the forum with another thread, but I just need someone to point me in the right direction. I am completely new to Linux. I played with Redhat years ago and a little with Ubuntu recently, but I am a total Linux newbie. I have tons of past networking experience in Novell and Windows 2000 server but now I am trying to re-learn the industry and familiarize myself with Linux.

Here is the situation and what I am trying to accomplish. I have acquired some older equipment with the hopes of building a Linux network. I have 5 desktops, all are P4's with 1gb to 2gb's of ram. I want to setup three of these as individual Linux servers. One as a web server, one as an email server and one as an internal file server for my home network. I do not plan on having monitors on these machines. Once they are setup I want to just set them on a shelf in a closet and let them run, so I don't really care about a GUI. I do want them to run efficiently and I do plan on going live online with the web server and and email server and using them for some website development I am doing and I would like it to be easy to setup accounts for other people to host sites on it, but traffic will be low.

Since I would like these to run without monitors, I have acquired an old Thinkpad T42 with a Pentium M and 1gb of ram. I would like to manage these servers from this laptop.

I am trying to simulate a production environment partially for training myself on Linux and partially for my own use.

I was originally thinking Lunbuntu on these machines would be the best bet, but since the "Servers" will not have monitors and I want to manage them from another computer on the network I no longer feel that is my best option.

I am just not sure where to start. Anyone have any input on how to put this all together to make it run right?

THANKS!

Creating a headless server is common enough, but it's easier and quicker to set up the computer using a monitor. Otherwise, this should help
https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/instal...c-install.html

An alternative to Lubuntu would be CentOS 6: this computer has a similar specification to the ones you will be using. Here are the instructions for automatic installation
https://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/I...ickstart2.html
Incidentally, the CentOS installer offers the options of web server, database server, and basic server; the Lubuntu installer does a generic installation.

Thanks for your response! CentOS sounds like it may be a good option. How functional is the web server? Do you know if it has any limitations? It would be great to find an option that basically works out of the box. How well do you think this would work on a Pentium M laptop? I would like to run the same distribution and version on Linux on all the machines.

I've never used the server installations, but the two most popular distros for web servers (according to surveys) are CentOS and Debian Stable.

CentOS might be sluggish on the Pentium M. My Thinkpad is the computer with Salix. The best solution might be to use Scientific Linux. That's almost identical to CentOS (a free Red Hat) but produced by CERN. They add the option to do a desktop installation with the Ice window manager, since they have a lot of elderly computers themselves. Icewm is OK on a Pentium II.

Cent 6.6 will run fine on old P4 boxes

i have ScientificLinux 6.6 running fine on a DELL from 2001 with 1 gig ram
the only issue is the Nvidia gforce2 card
i have to downgrade xorg to the version that was in 6.3

for a headless server
6.6 will be fine
7.1 ????? maybe not but 6 will run fine

While I am mostly past P4s in my production machines, I run entirely on reclaimed hardware, and have for quite a few years now.

I use Slackware almost exclusively and would highly recommend it for a P4 headless server.

You will probably hear that it takes more effort to set up, but I would dispute that, particularly for your servers if your expectations and skills are anything beyond the point-and-click knowledge level. I would suggest that you grab a Slackware 14.1 ISO and install it - see for yourself!

At the minimum it should be a great learning experience and the Slackware forum here is filled with knowledgable, helpful people!

Good luck and welcome to LQ!

I'd wonder the energy this versus a modern system running a number of virtual machines. My non-tested guess would be that you could buy a new system with the savings on electricity. You'd get a good chunk of money at the recycle place for the old stuff.


Guess you could put a kill-a-watt meter on them to decide.

1 members found this post helpful.

I have an old P4 with 256 MB RAM running Debian Wheezy. You could just do a minimal net install and load whatever stuff you want. I use mine as a file server, and manage it remotely via ssh.

I appreciate everyone's input. It looks like I need to do some further research on a few distributions mentioned here and see what my best options would be.

+1 for post #7.
Cost of power here is going through the roof - not to mention fan noise.

I keep looking at something ARM based for a (family only) owncloud/mail host. My P4 only gets fired up when I want to test something and don't want to risk my "real" systems.

forgot the "which distro". I like Arch - ever since I gave up on gentoo during the dev wars of yore.

I see everyone's point about power consumption. I guess I kinda through that concern out the window. Maybe I would be better off to just build a machine specifically for this project.

In that case, I would probably just use Ubuntu? It seems to be very popular these days on newer machines. I tried the newest version a while back on a P4 3.0ghz/hyperthreading with 2gb's of ram and it ran like sh*t. I then tried it on my main PC (quad core, 8gb ram, SSD) and it ran great. I am not really sure where the sweet spot would be there as far as specs. Then again, I am not sure that Ubuntu is the best option either.

In the Windows world we wish we had other options and in the Linux world we have too many.

Yeah, Ubuntu doesn't do too well on older hardware. Lubuntu seems to do better, but not by much.

Personally, I don't like Ubuntu, but that's just me. My recommendation is Debian Jessie, which was just released as stable in the past few weeks. And when Debian releases a version as "stable," it's rock-solid. You can still go with a headless version (actually easier, you don't need a separate "server version" install disc) or you can install a desktop environment.

Hope this helps!

I guess my thought was that I would be running these machines with minimal hardware (just a hard drive, no floppy/cdrom) in the attempt to avoid unnecessary power consumption. I have a friend that until recently was mining bitcoin. He had five machines stacked full of video cards that were overclocked. His power bill was through the roof! His office was so hot that walking in there would cause you to lose your breath. It didn't take long for the power consumption to out weight the profit from the mining.

So if I build a dual core with 4gb of ram and set it up with a monitor, would I be able to run one of the latest releases of any distribution and use it as a web server, email server and file server. What I mean is, would I be happy with the performance?

I know this might sound like a crazy question, but every Linux distribution I have ever played with seemed to be a serious resource hog. I know everyone says that Linux is a lighter OS then Windows, but I never install the right distribution on a well matched machine.

At the moment I going to try out a few different distributions on my main pc using VMware. I am playing with Ubuntu first and then I will go from there. I am going to build another newer computer to run Linux on and probably ditch the older hardware. I think it would be better for me to build a machine that fits the Linux I want to use and fits what I want to do with it instead of trying to find the right Linux for an old machine that will never be to par.

I do appreciate everyones input!