As you all know by now, we have had a bit of trouble in the past with our web-hosting. Whether it is hardware issues, OS issues or just poor support, our history is riddled with problems and horror stories. Not so anymore.

During one of our frontpage rants about our current server, a reader emailed to offer us collocation services with his hosting company. The offer was just entirely too good to pass-up on, so we set out building our very own webserver. Considering that the last server build/upgrade that I was in charge of had a $65,000 USD budget, I was in for a few rude surprises. Luckily we kept plugging away and we now have a completed box, all ready to ship off to the datacenter.

Since "infrastructure" articles seem to be all the rage at some other hardware sites, I figured that Jim and I should write-up a little something about our new machine, why I chose the hardware that I did and why he chose the OS and configuration that he did. I mean, this server was made possible through donations from you guys, so you -should- know what the money and/or hardware donations went in to, right?

I'll start off with a bit about the hardware and then Jim will finish-up with the OS and configuration stuff. Sound okay? Okay.

Evaluating our requirements

Jim and I had some long discussions about what we needed from our new server. I had some pretty big ideas about what I wanted, but, as usual, Jim was my reality check. He made sure to counterpoint my every point (he is the perfect "Devil's Advocate" for stuff like this) and we eventually wound-up somewhere in the middle.

One thing we knew for sure was that we would need to be able to handle some heavy MySQL traffic. Our forums are obviously powered by PHP and MySQL so database querries are a big part of every day use on our web server. We also knew that MalHavoc's new backend for our site was PHP/MySQL driven, eventually adding even more querries into the mix. Databases love three things... Memory, L2 cache and disk speed. And so the foundation for our new server was laid.

The Foundation

When all the dust settled, Jim and I had decided on a nice dual PIII box to host our pride and joy. Coincidentally I had just received a Tyan Thunder LE-T for review. The Thunder LE-T is almost identical to the Thunder LE that I loved so much, except it added support for Intel's "Tualatin" PIII's, hence the "LE-T". I was so impressed with the Thunder LE that I decided to put my money where my mouth was, and the LE-T became the motherboard of choice.

The Thunder LE-T is a pretty serious server board. It comes with all the nifty error logging in the BIOS (which I enabled, of course), and the combination of registered ECC memory and a Serverworks chipset will help me sleep better at night. The board also has the option for the Adaptec "Zero Channel RAID" (which I was especially excited about initially), and it is geared for a small rackmount box... Perfect for what we need.

The Processors

Coppermine PIII's were starting to become a "dime a dozen" as they say, and I had a pair of reasonably fast ones kicking around at the time, so we weren't too concerned about the CPU's. That is, until Upaboveit ran across a -really- nice deal on a pair of 1.13ghz PIII-S' ("Tualatin" with 512k cache). As I said before, databases eat cache for lunch, so we jumped on the pair of Tuallies.

The "Tualatin" PIII's did more than provide a bigger L2 cache for us though. Because they are based on a smaller process (.13 micron) than that of the "Coppermine" PIII's, they used less voltage and put out a lot less heat. In a small rackmount case, heat can be a killer and with the integrated heat-spreader and lower heat output in general, the "Tualatin" is a perfect match for us. Since I wasn't sure what case the machine was going in quite yet, I figured the Alpha's 1U cooler would be a good bet. They cool the 1.13's just fine, and a 1U case was definitely an option for us. Better safe than sorry.

The Memory

As for memory, Jim and I each had 512mb of of Registered ECC PC133 (the Serverworks chipset requires Registered ECC) for motherboard testing, so we combined it all to make an even 1024mb of system memory. We wanted more, but hey, 1gb of memory is 1gb of memory, so we were set to live with it. Until a very generous reader (Thanks Jason!) offered to trade/donate some memory. When the deal was settled, we had 2gb of PC133 Registered ECC memory.

It was one of those cases where we could've gotten by with the 1gb that we had, but having more is not going to hurt us (Heh) and it provides a bit of headroom for the future. With the majority of the "major" stuff covered, it was time to make some tough decisions.