For the last three years our main file server for backups has been a Linux computer.
Its specs are very basic:
VIA EPIA ME-6000 Mini-ITX motherboard with 600 mHz passively cooled C3 CPU
128MB DDR SDRAM (probably from Crucial)
Samsung Spinpoint P series 160GB 7200 rpm hard drive
IBM Flex-ATX case with a power supply of 150 watts or so - these were selling on eBay at fantastic prices at the time, evidently from a canceled production run
I temporarily added a spare CD-ROM drive to install White Box Enterprise Linux 3.0. Today I'd choose CentOS 4.6 or 5.1. I didn't install the GUI, and I do almost all maintenance on an ssh command line using putty.
After configuring Samba and setting up some shares, this computer has needed almost no maintenance at all. It cost less than $300 to put together, uses 30 or 40 watts at idle and is close to silent. At what I pay for electricity, it is saving me about $100 per year compared to a full-sized computer of that era, so it has paid for itself while providing reliable service.
Each of us (all three of us) has a batch file to back up any changed or added files in our document directories with a single click.
[batch file contents]
rem documents
xcopy c:\documents\* \\porpoise\shared\david\documents /C /M /E /Y
rem email
xcopy "C:\Documents and Settings\David\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles" \\porpoise\shared\david\thunderbird /C /M /E /Y
rem outlook
xcopy "C:\Documents and Settings\David\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook" \\porpoise\shared\david\outlook /C /M /E /Y
rem quicken has a bug, fails to open the file unless a is set
attrib +a c:\documents\quicken\*.*
pause
[end of batch file]
This simple setup lets us restore accidentally deleted files, access another person's documents without turning on her computer, and create consolidated backup DVDs by copying the whole mess to a Windows computer with a DVD drive. It's not sophisticated, but I favor simplicity and transparency.
The VIA CPU at 600 MHz seems about as fast as a 400 MHz Pentium II or III. But you don't need anything faster for a small workgroup file server running Linux. Even in 2004, 128MB was a minimal amount of memory, but I have never seen a need for more. By right-sizing this server instead of overbuilding, I saved on money, space and noise. And I avoided wasting thousands of kilowatt-hours of electricity that a Netburst Pentium 4 power-hog would have used, saving hundreds of dollars more.
But now it's 2008, and the 160GB Samsung drive is 97% full. There are many options - I could:
- keep using the old server by culling old files and directories, moving them to offline storage
- keep using the old server by upgrading to a larger hard disk drive - probably the easiest and most economical way to go
- upgrade the entire system to a more recent, equivalent platform - if I were to do this, I'd use an Intel D201GLY2 motherboard, which would support either a current Linux install or [Solaris].
But instead I want to try another route. Microsoft's Small Business Server has a number of features that could prove useful in our business - Sharepoint collaboration being near the top. I'm not ready to commit to it, but I want to give it a try. The problem is, when I installed a beta copy of Windows Server 2008 on a spare P4 machine - <i>many</i> times more powerful than the Via box - it ran at an odious crawl. So for SBS I need a new server, and something more powerful than the Celeron 220 and 1GB max available with the D201GLY2.
[more later...]
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