Hey everyone,

I am looking for a little bit of advice here. I am trying to build a testing box for some servers that we have, it will be mostly to test integration problems with new version of apache and php and mysql, some other things like that. What I am trying to figure out is what can I do to get the testing box to function pretty much the same as the real server without using a lot of the expensive parts. So I thought I would give the specs here and see what people think.

Duel Xeon 2.8
2 GB RAM
2 x 73 GB SCSI 15k HDs
RHEL 4
It is a dell machine.

So what I am wondering is can I change somethings up a bit but still get the same results. Can I use a P4 or a Celeron D instead of a Xeon, won't it be the same since it is the same architecture. As for RAM I can have less since the machine will be under less stress and the HDs can be ATA ones cause it is not going to have tons of reads. In terms of the OS, can I use something else so I don't have to pay for RHEL for that machine, maybe fedora, I am not sure if it makes much of a difference since they both have the 2.6 kernel.

I would really appriciate any suggestions people can throw at me. Thanks

For the hardware as long as it is the same basic chipset (x86) I'd say you're approach is valid. For the OS though I'd probably want to install the same version on test as production. This is because there ARE differences even though RHEL is built based on what comes out of Fedora. On RH's own site they indicate that Fedora typically will have more and/or newer packages than they vet for the official RH releases. Also since RH is now a commercial product its apt to have some proprietary stuff in it that doesn't exist in Fedora.

For most purposes I'd think Fedora would be a good test bed but rolling out to Production from there could have some issues due to things you don't even think about.