So I'm on a budget, but I needed a new server. I really wanted a dual-SATA 
Raid, 2-CPU Opteron 64 with 4 GB Rack system, but settled on a closeout 
white-box system with an single Intel P4 3.4 GHz, 1 GB of RAM and a single 
SATA 250 GB drive and gigabit ethernet, which came with a bunch of unneeded 
stuff including:

+ ATI Radeon card
+ TV input card
+ speakers with subwoofer
+ keyboard and mouse
+ Windows XP Media Center Edition

Total cost of about $1100. Then I brought it home, booted and installed 
Ubuntu Warty (I didn't take the time to download the latest Hoary release) 
using the custom-expert option. A hiccup happened early in the install as 
my cd-rom (actually dvd) wasn't recognized, even though it had already 
booted from it to get that far. A quick Google told me the answer: in the 
BIOS, switch from ATA Compatible to ATA Enhanced mode. Bingo.

Twenty minutes later and I'm logged in to my new install - no GUI as this 
is a pure server box. I cd to /etc/apt and modify my sources.list to change 
all 'warty' references to 'hoary', and then I issue 'apt-get update;apt-get 
dist-upgrade' and 10 minutes later my system is completely up to date. Then 
I use apt-get to install a bunch of stuff, including:

subversion
apache2
mod_python
ssh-server
mysql (server and client)
reportlab
bind9

and about an hour later I have myself the beginnings of a killer server. And 
I still haven't had to compile a single thing. This is really sweet, the best 
experience I've had yet getting a server up and running.

© 2005 Paul McNett       [/Computing/Linux] permanent link