Re: tlug: Fw: Linux Web Server

[jq@example.com]

On Fri, 20 Aug 1999, Jack Morgan wrote:

>a sound card. I am planning to buy an ATX box with an ABIT BP6 duel CPU with
>two Celron 433mhz, (hopefully interlocked), 10GB HDD, a FDD, and two

Interlocked??  Not sure what you mean, but the important thing here is
to get two identical Celerons - ones with the same lot number.  Chip
makers make small running changes to their chips, and while these
changes don't matter on single-CPU systems, they matter if you want to
do SMP, so make sure those chips are the same.  When you buy them, make
sure they know that you need matched Celerons, and why.  Getting the
board and Celerons in the same place wouldn't hurt, since they will be
more likely to understand the need for this (but make sure to tell them
anyway).

As far as hardware that works with Linux, the answer these days is
"almost everything."  The most radical new video and sound cards usually
suffer from a support lag, and USB isn't there yet, but most other stuff
is fine. 

In Ethernet cards, 3Com and Intel work very well, but so do some really
cheap ones like Planex and (I'm told) Corega.  Bus Logic and Adaptec
SCSI cards are good.  Yeah, I know some people will tell me they've had
tons of them go belly-up, but we have dozens of them at work and have
never had a failure, so I like the Adaptec 2940UW quite well.  A bulk
version will cost you about 22,000 yen.  A boxed one will cost a good
bit more, so get the bulk one.  It's all you need.  Of course, if you
don't plan on going with SCSI, never mind  :-)

In video cards, Matrox are very nice and work quite well.  The G200 is
fast, nice, reasonably priced.  I haven't checked whether the newer and
nicer G400 is supported by X yet or not, but it probably is.  However,
do check the compatibility list for yourself rather than take my word
for it before buying one.

Unless you make an Ethernet crossover cable, you'll also need a hub to
plug both machines into if you want to network them.

>    As for software I am planning to keep my Windows 98 (for my wife), and
>install Redhat 6.0, Cladera 2.2 (which I got from the last TLUG meeting-
>Thanks), and Turbo Linux as my Japanese software. I am hopping to convert my
>wife.

Three different Linux flavors?   I would cut that down to two, I think.
After all, you don't want to be dual-booting a Linux box between Linux
flavors - you'll never set any uptime records that way  :-)  If you need
a Japanese system on your workstation, just put TurboLinux on it rather
than Red Hat, I think.  Or you could, alternatively, put in Red Hat and
install some of the Japanese packages from TurboLinux.  I guess that
depends on how much Japanese you need in your Linux distro.  

Finally, file system lay out.  I recommend partitoning your disk like
this:

/
/usr
/usr/local
/var
/var/spool
/home
/var/log

OK, the last one is optional, and less important on a machine that isn't
a production server.  Leave it out if you want, and just let your logs
go into /var.  If you will be using multiple disk drives, two smaller
swap partitions  on different drives can give better performance than
a larger one on a single drive.  This is, however, going to be rather
academic on a dual-Celeron machine with the light load it will be under
as a workstation.  With enough memory (e.g., 256 meg), you'll probably
never use the swap space anyway.

The benefit of having /usr/local, /home, and /var/spool as separate file
systems is that it makes upgrading very seamless.  I use this layout,
and I switched from a Red Hat 6 install to a TurboLinux-J 4.0 install
just by installing TurboLinux over the Red Hat system and rebooting.
Almost no adjustments at all were required.  Although Red Hat and TL are
pretty similar, I think you could change between most/all current Linux
distributions with similar ease.  Compare this to the "One Big C Drive"
approach taken by some other operating systems - and the attendant
difficulty of upgrading them - and you'll have one more reason to like
Linux a lot.

Last but not least, when you have that fire-breathing BP6 machine up and
running, your participation on the TLUG RC5-64 team will be most welcome
indeed  :-)

Cheers,

Jonathan

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