My thoughts:Agreed on the "as fast a CPU as you can afford" and the 10K RPM disk comments. However I'm not a huge fan of SATA yet. There's been quite a bit of discussion on various mailing lists of people having trouble with them. I'm old-school and would prefer the more expensive SCSI SCA-connector'ed disks in most of the servers I have spec'ed.
The redundant power supply comment is appropriate if this box is an only-child -- I try not to design anything anymore that a single box failure can take down, but sometimes it's a trade-off between what the software will do and what you'd like it to do. MySQL's not the most robust DB for replication yet, so I'm guessing you're not doing multiple boxes. If it's in a data-center environment with clean power, you'll probably never have a problem with it in the lifespan of the box.
The GeForce graphics card is probably overkill for a server if you're not running X on it, but the MX400 is cheap, so that might not really be an issue. It's a good 2D card.
Depending on how you're doing your backups, an inexpensive upgrade to a CD-RW drive vs. the CD-R that's on your list might be useful. I wouldn't fully trust CD-RW for backups, but it's handy to have to make quick images of the filesystems or to dump a quick "just in case" tarfile to. Some people also like the Mondo/Mindi type tools that shoot images of the disk off to CD-RW's for a bare-metal recovery option.
If you don't have any other machines in your data center with CD-RW's you can use it to do similar things for those machines if you have enough leftover drive space in this box or are willing to share out the CD-RW disk, depending on your security model.
The other thing to watch out for in PC-based hardware is that the motherboard has a "reboot after power loss" feature. If it doesn't you have to go to the box and push the power button after a power loss, which is not fun if you live across town from it. Same thing with keyboards... you don't want a "desktop" machine's motherboard that complains about a keyboard not being attached on a server... which would mean you have to leave a keyboard plugged into it so it'll boot properly.
I tend to lean toward motherboards with a real serial port on them also, as you can configure a serial console to come up on one of them and use that from a laptop or what-have-you when you go to do maintenance instead of lugging a monitor/keyboard over to it. But they're getting harder to find.
Nate, nate@natetech.com Neale Banks wrote:
Hi all, As part of a project I'm involved in, we need to deploy a new server (ia32, FWIW: running Debian "sarge") to run a MySQL database (SME-sized, moderate complexity but not particularly large) + Java Application. I figure that upgradability probably isn't a big issue here, as the obvious path is to deploy a second machine and separate the SQL and java onto separate hosts. A spec being considered includes: DFI PS83BL Intel 865 Chipset Hyper Threading Main Board (H/Threading, 800MHz FSB, AGP 8x, DDR400, 6-channel audio, S/PDIF-in/out, SATA, LAN, USB 2.0) Pentium 4 2.66GHz (533Mhz) CPU 2 x 512MB DDR400 Memory 3Ware 7506-4LP ATA 133 RAID Controller 2 x 40GB WD JB-series IDE HDD (7200RPM, 8MB Cache) (disks to run mirrored) Geoforce2 MX400 64MB DDR Graphics Card 52x IDE CDROM (usual bits: FDD, k/board etc) Anyone care to comment at to the appropriateness of the above spec (i.e. strengths, weaknesses, over/under-kill etc), in particular in terms of value-for-money? Thanks, Neale.