[olug] Server Motherboard Recomendations.

[Aric]

I am a hardware geek so I tend to be a whitebox only kind of guy.

If it is going to be a Rackmount id suggest looking at some Supermicro
barebones on ebay.

I am loading Xenserver 5 on a whitebox as I type this now.  I am using a
Supermicro C2SBA+
I got it cheap from newegg openbox
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182124R
........I wanted the extra 4x pcie for a 3ware card.

I have had about 50% luck with gigabyte ga-p35-dsr3 boards as servers.

It is a VERY good idea to have registered ECC memory in a server.  In my
experience this has been the biggest difference from "Server" motherboards
and desktop systems.

I would seriously consider an Asus or Supermicro board with an intel 5000 or
better a 5400 chipset with DDR2 FB-DIMM's.

2GHz Harpertowns are only $220.... 4 cores with 12megs of cache is a serious
CPU for the $.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117151

Whatever you do burn it in and try to break first.

Aric Aasgaard

-----Original Message-----
From: olug-bounces at olug.org [mailto:olug-bounces at olug.org] On Behalf Of
Jesse Regier
Sent: Saturday, March 21, 2009 5:08 PM
To: Olug at olug.org
Subject: [olug] Server Motherboard Recomendations.

Ola' Olug,

I will be traveling to Brazil next month to help a missionary friend out 
with a new server at a radio station.  We are planning to setup a  Samba 
server probably on Centos. (5.3 hopefully)  I haven't been in the 
whitebox server game for a while and need some recommendations for the 
the motherboard.   What has been working for you all lately?

This will be their  first Linux box down there and I its a long way to 
go to support it, so I need things to work out of the box.  (No custom 
kernels etc.)

I'm thinking it will probably be a Core2 Duo processor.  ATX 
Motherboard,  2 mirrored SATA drives. (Software raid - don't want a raid 
controller to go bad that they can't get a replacement for.)   The rest 
is pretty flexible.  The key is reliablity. 

We will be replacing an ancient Windows NT 4.0 server.

Thanks,


Jesse Regier






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