old computer-file server

  • Thread starter Thread starter Josh
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J

Josh

Got several old door-stops laying around, vintage PII-266, PII-300,
and a PII-350.

a couple of months ago, I couldn't resist buying 3 Seagate 160gb HD's
on sale for $40 apiece. I had figured I would be selling them to
friends/family/somebody, but everybody I know is just buying new
Dell's (don't get me started on Dell's). So, rather than have them
collect dust forever, I'm thinking of turning one or two of those old
PII'2 into a file server, using a Promise Ultra133 card.

Anyone have an opinion as to: How much would these old CPU's
bottleneck file transfer? They will be running win2000. Thought of
Linux, but I believe the latest distro's (Red Hat & Suse anyway) have
higher hardware requirements?

I'd rather save these HD's as "new, still in shrink wrap" rather than
try them out and then see the PII's aren't going to be able to handle
it.

As a side note, gb NIC's are cheap now, and gb (1000mbps) switches
aren't too bad, thought upgrading my home network.

Thoughts?

Thanks, Josh
 
Josh said:
Got several old door-stops laying around, vintage PII-266, PII-300,
and a PII-350.

a couple of months ago, I couldn't resist buying 3 Seagate 160gb HD's
on sale for $40 apiece. I had figured I would be selling them to
friends/family/somebody, but everybody I know is just buying new
Dell's (don't get me started on Dell's). So, rather than have them
collect dust forever, I'm thinking of turning one or two of those old
PII'2 into a file server, using a Promise Ultra133 card.

Anyone have an opinion as to: How much would these old CPU's
bottleneck file transfer? They will be running win2000. Thought of
Linux, but I believe the latest distro's (Red Hat & Suse anyway) have
higher hardware requirements?

I'd rather save these HD's as "new, still in shrink wrap" rather than
try them out and then see the PII's aren't going to be able to handle
it.
Click to expand...
As a side note, gb NIC's are cheap now, and gb (1000mbps)
switches aren't too bad, thought upgrading my home network.
Click to expand...
Thoughts?
Click to expand...

More modern systems are generally a lot less hassle memory wise.

Even P3 socket 7 systems can be a pain in the arse unless you use simms.
 
Josh said:
Got several old door-stops laying around, vintage PII-266, PII-300,
and a PII-350.

a couple of months ago, I couldn't resist buying 3 Seagate 160gb HD's
on sale for $40 apiece. I had figured I would be selling them to
friends/family/somebody, but everybody I know is just buying new
Dell's (don't get me started on Dell's). So, rather than have them
collect dust forever, I'm thinking of turning one or two of those old
PII'2 into a file server, using a Promise Ultra133 card.

Anyone have an opinion as to: How much would these old CPU's
bottleneck file transfer? They will be running win2000. Thought of
Linux, but I believe the latest distro's (Red Hat & Suse anyway) have
higher hardware requirements?

I'd rather save these HD's as "new, still in shrink wrap" rather than
try them out and then see the PII's aren't going to be able to handle
it.

As a side note, gb NIC's are cheap now, and gb (1000mbps) switches
aren't too bad, thought upgrading my home network.

Thoughts?

Thanks, Josh
Click to expand...

The motherboards in PCs of that age may not be able to handle drives
that size without a BIOS update, if one is even available.

Regards,

Ari


--
spammage trappage: remove the underscores to reply

I'm going to die rather sooner than I'd like. I tried to protect my
neighbours from crime, and became the victim of it. Complications in
hospital following this resulted in a serious illness. I now need a bone
marrow transplant. Many people around the world are waiting for a marrow
transplant, too. Please volunteer to be a marrow donor:
http://www.abmdr.org.au/
http://www.marrow.org/
 
The motherboards in PCs of that age may not be able to handle drives
that size without a BIOS update, if one is even available.

Regards,

Ari
Click to expand...

The BIOS on the Promise card handles that, though.

(I mis-typed, they are 120gb, not 160gb. )

Thanks
 
Josh said:
Got several old door-stops laying around, vintage PII-266, PII-300,
and a PII-350.

a couple of months ago, I couldn't resist buying 3 Seagate 160gb HD's
on sale for $40 apiece. I had figured I would be selling them to
friends/family/somebody, but everybody I know is just buying new
Dell's (don't get me started on Dell's). So, rather than have them
collect dust forever, I'm thinking of turning one or two of those old
PII'2 into a file server, using a Promise Ultra133 card.

Anyone have an opinion as to: How much would these old CPU's
bottleneck file transfer? They will be running win2000. Thought of
Linux, but I believe the latest distro's (Red Hat & Suse anyway) have
higher hardware requirements?

I'd rather save these HD's as "new, still in shrink wrap" rather than
try them out and then see the PII's aren't going to be able to handle
it.

As a side note, gb NIC's are cheap now, and gb (1000mbps) switches
aren't too bad, thought upgrading my home network.

Thoughts?
Click to expand...

Linux!

--
.~. Might, Courage, Vision, SINCERITY. http://www.linux-sxs.org
/ v \ Simplicity is Beauty! May the Force and Farce be with you!
/( _ )\ (Ubuntu 6.06) Linux 2.6.17.6
^ ^ 13:08:01 up 20:31 0 users load average: 1.00 1.02 1.00
news://news.3home.net news://news.hkpcug.org news://news.newsgroup.com.hk
 
Rod said:
More modern systems are generally a lot less hassle memory wise.

Even P3 socket 7 systems can be a pain in the arse unless you use simms.
Click to expand...

P3s are socket 370 (or Slot-1) and, except for perhaps some funky PCChips
motherboards that might have been made with SIMMs, are either SDRAM or the
aborted Intel Rambus.

The last Intel socket 7 CPU was the Pentium 233MMX.
 
Josh said:
The BIOS on the Promise card handles that, though.

(I mis-typed, they are 120gb, not 160gb. )

Thanks
Click to expand...

Sorry, i missed that :-)



--
spammage trappage: remove the underscores to reply

I'm going to die rather sooner than I'd like. I tried to protect my
neighbours from crime, and became the victim of it. Complications in
hospital following this resulted in a serious illness. I now need a bone
marrow transplant. Many people around the world are waiting for a marrow
transplant, too. Please volunteer to be a marrow donor:
http://www.abmdr.org.au/
http://www.marrow.org/
 
P3s are socket 370 (or Slot-1) and, except for perhaps some funky
PCChips motherboards that might have been made with SIMMs, are either SDRAM or the
aborted Intel Rambus.
Click to expand...
The last Intel socket 7 CPU was the Pentium 233MMX.
Click to expand...

Yeah, just a typo.
 
Linux!
Click to expand...

Yeah, guess I'll have to look into hardware requirements. Need to
take another look at Linux anyway, been a while since I last looked at
it (Mandrake)

Josh
 
How much RAM do you have?
Click to expand...

I installed Redhat Linux on an old PC with 126 meg of RAM. I selected
TEXT-ONLY. I installed Squid and a firewall on it. It runs very fast
as a proxy-server and it runs for months without much attention and no
rebooting. You will need more CPU power and RAM to run the GUI.
 
How much RAM do you have?
Click to expand...


They all have at least 128mb, and IIRC, at least one has 256, maybe 2
of them. I figured on canabilizing them, and making sure the one
I'll use has at least 256mb, more probably.

Josh
 
Got several old door-stops laying around, vintage PII-266, PII-300,
and a PII-350.

a couple of months ago, I couldn't resist buying 3 Seagate 160gb HD's
on sale for $40 apiece. I had figured I would be selling them to
friends/family/somebody, but everybody I know is just buying new
Dell's (don't get me started on Dell's). So, rather than have them
collect dust forever, I'm thinking of turning one or two of those old
PII'2 into a file server, using a Promise Ultra133 card.

Anyone have an opinion as to: How much would these old CPU's
bottleneck file transfer? They will be running win2000. Thought of
Linux, but I believe the latest distro's (Red Hat & Suse anyway) have
higher hardware requirements?

I'd rather save these HD's as "new, still in shrink wrap" rather than
try them out and then see the PII's aren't going to be able to handle
it.

As a side note, gb NIC's are cheap now, and gb (1000mbps) switches
aren't too bad, thought upgrading my home network.
Click to expand...


I doubt if the older machines could handle gb well. You might try
standard 10/100 with something such as freenas. I'm running freenas
on a p2/266 with 192mb ram and it is fine for pushing files through
the network.
 
Phisherman said:
I installed Redhat Linux on an old PC with 126 meg of RAM. I selected
TEXT-ONLY. I installed Squid and a firewall on it. It runs very fast
as a proxy-server and it runs for months without much attention and no
rebooting. You will need more CPU power and RAM to run the GUI.
Click to expand...

I think he can run okay with 256MB. His CPUs are pretty slow, so the
GUI will be pretty sluggish, but he won't be working on it every day
once it's set up.

I don't know that W2K will run any faster than the Red Hat or Suse GUIs
during maintenance.

Josh, you might want to look at Ubuntu Linux too. It is supposed to be
less demanding of the hardware.

If your server runs Linux and a client runs Windows, you will be running
Samba on the server. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samba_software

I believe that pure Linux client/server filesystems run a lot faster
than pure Windows systems. I don't know how mixed systems rate.
 
I think he can run okay with 256MB. His CPUs are pretty slow, so the
GUI will be pretty sluggish, but he won't be working on it every day
once it's set up.

I don't know that W2K will run any faster than the Red Hat or Suse GUIs
during maintenance.

Josh, you might want to look at Ubuntu Linux too. It is supposed to be
less demanding of the hardware.

If your server runs Linux and a client runs Windows, you will be running
Samba on the server. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samba_software

I believe that pure Linux client/server filesystems run a lot faster
than pure Windows systems. I don't know how mixed systems rate.
Click to expand...

Ubuntu........ok, I'll look into that. I've been meaning to play with
Linux/Samba sometime, I guess this is my opportunity.

Thanks, Josh
 
Ubuntu........ok, I'll look into that. I've been meaning to play with
Linux/Samba sometime, I guess this is my opportunity.

Thanks, Josh
Click to expand...

You might want to look into FreeNAS like Chris Hill suggested since it's
supposed to be small and support Samba (and other protocols) out of the box:

http://www.freenas.org/

From their FAQ:

"FreeNAS is a small (less than 16Mo) Operating System based on FreeBSD 6
that provide Free Network-Attached Storage services (CIFS, FTP and NFS)."

I'm planning a similar project (once I'm done setting up my mythtv box)
and will be going down the FreeNAS route first.
 
Josh said:
Ubuntu........ok, I'll look into that. I've been meaning to play with
Linux/Samba sometime, I guess this is my opportunity.

Thanks, Josh
Click to expand...

Sure.

I haven't used Ubuntu on a server, but I just happened to find this
(through comp.os.linux.advocacy):
In addition to outperforming Linux rivals as a desktop OS, we found that Ubuntu is a solid choice for server deployments—provided, at least, that the sort of graphical management hand-holding that one would expect from Microsoft's Windows Server or from Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server isn't a priority.

The server variant of Ubuntu is focused on slim, headless operation.

Administrators can install a graphical environment on top of Ubuntu, but server administration is a largely a command-line-driven affair.
Click to expand...

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1990777,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594
http://groups.google.com/groups/search?hl=en&q=ubuntu+"server+deployments"+outperforming&qt_s=Search
 
Yeah, guess I'll have to look into hardware requirements. Need to
take another look at Linux anyway, been a while since I last looked at
it (Mandrake)
Click to expand...

Recommend Fedora Core 5 if not Ubuntu.

--
.~. Might, Courage, Vision, SINCERITY. http://www.linux-sxs.org
/ v \ Simplicity is Beauty! May the Force and Farce be with you!
/( _ )\ (Ubuntu 6.06) Linux 2.6.17.6
^ ^ 20:12:01 up 4 days 3:35 1 user load average: 1.01 1.00 1.00
news://news.3home.net news://news.hkpcug.org news://news.newsgroup.com.hk
 
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