Edubuntu Server

[Uwe Geercken]

hello gavin,

you are a source of good information as always. tks. for your feedback.

actually I do not need a grafic card on the server but I though it  
would be good to have a cheap basic one, just in case I would want to  
work on the server or use an attached beamer or so.

to your other point. can you recommend a brand of raid controllers  
that will work fine? what about the disk. any basic recommendations  
for it (brand/size)?


thanks a lot.

uwe


Quoting Gavin McCullagh <gmccullagh at gmail.com>:

> Hi,
>
> On Wed, 26 Dec 2007, Uwe Geercken wrote:
>
>> I know that the main components like lan, harddisk, ram and prozessor
>> are important for the speed of the overall system. but I wonder if a
>> quad-core system will give me superior performance. is edubuntu using
>> the full power of such a prozessor and is this an optimal choice for
>> serving aroung 10 pc's? or would it be better to use a dual core at a
>> higher speed?
>
> The faster processor would have the ability to finish single tasks quicker
> (eg encoding a video sequence).  Multiple cores will usually give you more
> cpu power overall but that power must be split up over different processes
> or threads.  As you will have multiple desktop users running lots of
> processes, multiple cores will probably be more useful.  Linux (including
> edubuntu) has pretty good support for multiple cpus/cores.
>
>> I planned for following system:
>> Intel Core 2 Quad 2,44 GHz
>> 4 GB RAM
>> Gigabit LAN
>> Nvidia 8500 GT Grafic Card
>> 500 GB Samsung Disc
>> Gigabyte Mainboard
>
> If you're going to leave the server aside and have people log in to thin
> clients exclusively (this is not a bad idea in general), that video card
> will be a waste of money as it will not be used -- you might as well just
> get a €30 one or use the on-board.  You will probably need to use a
> proprietary driver (generally not recommended) to get anything more than
> basic performance from it¹.  Unless you have a good reason to want it, I
> would not recommend buying that card for a linux system.
>
> My other suggestion would be to consider buying two disks and using RAID1.
> This should mean that in the event of a disk failure, your system will
> continue to work while you source a replacement disk.  Otherwise, the
> entire system goes down until you replace the disk, reinstall and recover
> from backups (several hours work at minimum).  You could either get a SATA
> RAID controller for this, or just use linux's in-built software RAID.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID_1#RAID_1
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
>
> Gavin
>
> ¹ This is true of the high end cards from both ATI and NVidia.  The
> situation is improving with ATI now as they have published specs to help
> write free drivers.  These drivers are in development though so aren't in
> Ubuntu just yet.  If you really need a flashy video card, I'd prefer ATI
> over NVidia.
>
>
>
> --
> edubuntu-users mailing list
> edubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
> Modify settings or unsubscribe at:   
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-users
>