Today's technobabble...
Not sure how many technophiles read this, but in case you're interested: The migration of my internet server to a collocation facility is coming up off the back burner, driven by a confluence of incentive and means. Now I have to decide implementation details...
The basic plan is to run a collection of virtual servers for the various functions people use the machine for. I'll do this with User-Mode-Linux, since it's free and seems suitable. The existing machine, a K6-2/450, is feeling a little slow. Doing the virtual server thing will be a slight performance hit and will likely lead to me running more services. So a faster machine is called for.
Option one
My household fileserver machine is a 1 GHz Duron with a 90 GB RAID-5 volume. Plenty of disk space for anything we're doing now. Not fast enough to feel much faster than the existing machine, though, so this wouldn't leave much room for expansion.
Option two
Contributions to defray some of the cost of running the server have begun to trickle in. I could easily pick up a much faster CPU and motherboard, choosing a motherboard that would be easier to work with. For CA$200 (US$150, e.g., the yearly maintenence contribution of three users), I could pick up a nice Asus A7v600 with an Athlon 1800+ on it. Then I'd sorta need a pair of SATA drives, since two of its interfaces are SATA. If I'm going to spend money on a new motherboard, I'd want to get something powerful enough to support various servers expanding, and with all necessary features on-board (LAN, video, 4xATA133 for RAID...). A dual-cpu board would be nice, but would more than double the price.
Option three
Any suggestions?
For tonight, I think I'll take an old P166 or something and try setting up the "parent" server rules. Gotta see how hard routing among a bunch of U-M-L sessions is, and how hard the bandwidth-monitoring and -clamping scripts will be to write. Might be time to float these ideas past SEMiSLUG to see what people there know.