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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mira.net.au!news.netspace.net.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.Hawaii.Edu!news.uoregon.edu!hunter.premier.net!news.mathworks.com!enews.sgi.com!news.corp.sgi.com!inn From: David Moles <deivu@eccosys.com> Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.hardware,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: minimum system config? Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 10:43:00 -0800 Organization: Silicon Surf Lines: 67 Message-ID: <3274FEB4.446B@eccosys.com> References: <3270F930.7D55@eccosys.com> <54rk5e$bec@hydaspes.if.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: morpheus.corp.sgi.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0SC-SGI (X11; I; IRIX 6.2 IP22) Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.hardware:54680 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:30098 nathan wagner wrote: > > In article <3270F930.7D55@eccosys.com>, David Moles <deivu@eccosys.com> wrote: > >Okay. I'm thinking of building an x86 'NIX box to act as an > >apartment mail server and not much else. What's the cheapest > >thing I can get away with? Assume that I can borrow a monitor > >and keyboard from another box when necessary. What are the > >absolute minumum hardware requirements? What would be the > >next step or two up from that? > > Well, minimum? Ok. > > 16 MHz 386 CPU + motherboard > ide interface card > 20 MB Hard Drive > 2 MB memory > A serial port. > > You will probably also need a video card so that the bios will boot the > machine, and you will need to borrow a keyboard for booting (that could be > pulled out after the boot; i suppose you could pull out the video card after > boot too, but i wouldn't recommend it). You will also need to borrow > something to install with, probably a floppy, though i suppose you could put > the hard drive on another machine, install linux there, then move the drive. > Whee! Okay, it looks like the earlier post that "the cheapest new x86 box you can buy will do fine" was more than true. Maybe I'll just see what the 486-flavor-of-the-month is at Weird Stuff Warehouse. > That should do you for. Use the serial port to connect to whatever you > are serving mail to. What are you serving mail to anyway? Other linux > boxes? If so, why not just use one of those? > The house will probably have two Macs and one x86 box that runs Linux most of the time but is occasionally shut down and rebooted in DOS for the purpose of playing games, and so can't be counted on as a server. > A step up? Are you scrounging for equipment, or just wanting to go cheap? > > I'd say get some more memory (4 megs to start), and maybe some more disk, > depending on how much mail you are expecting to have to store. Keyboards are > cheap too, mine was $10 at a used computer store. > > Then you could get a real network card, rather than using the serial port. > Probably will -- we already have a hub and NE2K cards seem to be cheap. And memory's still pretty low, so that makes sense. > As a practical minimal email server for a low traffic situation, i'd > say get 8 MB memory, a 386 or 486 box (you won't need much cpu for what you > are doing, so the processor doesn't matter too much), and a network card. > Disks are pretty cheap, you may even be able to find someone who will give > you one, depending on who you know (there are lots of homeless 40 MB ide > drives out there, if you know where to look). > Okay, engineering change: My roommate says he wants to run WWW and FTP off of it as well (that should be fun as we'll probably only have a 28.8 line) -- what else would y'all recommend? Just 16MB RAM and a bigger hard disk, I suppose? I really doubt it will get much traffic. --D