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Building a home server for development/testing

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DarrylLicke

Member
My hand has been forced luckily and I'll be building a new computer soon. But in doing so I want to go forward with my idea of having my own server so I can tinker and learn new apps/languages as they come out i.e. load websphere or weblogic or the like and serve web pages on an intranet.

Now I want to keep the number of machines to a minimum. As it stands the ideal final situation would be:

-a download desktop running linux that will always be connected to the internet for torrents
-a file server not connected to the internet (SOHO LAN) that would also double as a web server AND an application server
-a laptop to allow portable internet and not keep me at home for internet access

Now the hang up is the 2nd machine....is it possible to have one machine running and it serve as the file server, web server, and the application server (if neccesary) at the same time? Would this work if each aspect was a singlular process? If the later is possible yes the machine would be built to a pretty high end spec.

The first machine is something I'm going to through together so I'm not borrowing my buddies machine for ever (I'm borrowing it because my apartment burnt down and he understands my internets addiction. That and the current job search).

So is this possible or am I going to have to build separate machines? The ulterior motive is to get my feet wet in sys admin stuff.

p.s. if I posted this in the wrong forum I apologize
 
You can certainly put it all on one machine and, unless you're running a particularly heavy website you will really not need much power at all. Well, I guess if you're doing dev work and constantly restarting app servers it would help, but it's not necessary for serving content. Throw a database on there, a mail server, dns. It won't matter.

I'm curious about your plans to run weblogic and websphere. Do IBM and BEA offer free trial editions? I'm pretty sure websphere is supposed to run on an ibm jvm which is only legal on ibm hardware.
 
Originally posted by: kamper
You can certainly put it all on one machine and, unless you're running a particularly heavy website you will really not need much power at all. Well, I guess if you're doing dev work and constantly restarting app servers it would help, but it's not necessary for serving content. Throw a database on there, a mail server, dns. It won't matter.
Click to expand...

No the website would be completely and totally internal so at most 2 users, if that. My only concern was whether a single machine could operate all those functions simultaneously. That seems to be the case so that is great.

Originally posted by: kamperI'm curious about your plans to run weblogic and websphere. Do IBM and BEA offer free trial editions? I'm pretty sure websphere is supposed to run on an ibm jvm which is only legal on ibm hardware.
Click to expand...

They do offer trial editions and I could of sworn that IBM opened up websphere through that Open source partnership a few months back. If not I'll just upload the open source equivalent.
 
a 2 user web server / file server offers absolutely no burden. File serving does nothing unless someone is actively reading/writing something and with only 2 people... how often will that actually be. The web server is even less overhead (just reading no writing).

The only issue would be the app server functionality. If you start throwing SQL on it or something, the machine might start chugging (depending on how good it is).
 
Originally posted by: skace
a 2 user web server / file server offers absolutely no burden. File serving does nothing unless someone is actively reading/writing something and with only 2 people... how often will that actually be. The web server is even less overhead (just reading no writing).

The only issue would be the app server functionality. If you start throwing SQL on it or something, the machine might start chugging (depending on how good it is).
Click to expand...
I guess you might run into problems where progs start fighting for memory. An app server and database server might automatically grab way more than they need for home use. But other than that there should be no added strain from anything unless it is particularly busy. It'll depend on what operating system is being used too. An X-less *nix machine generally runs on virtually nothing. But with windows or X, a gig wouldn't hurt if it's not too hard to come by.
 
Originally posted by: kamper
Originally posted by: skace
a 2 user web server / file server offers absolutely no burden. File serving does nothing unless someone is actively reading/writing something and with only 2 people... how often will that actually be. The web server is even less overhead (just reading no writing).

The only issue would be the app server functionality. If you start throwing SQL on it or something, the machine might start chugging (depending on how good it is).
Click to expand...
I guess you might run into problems where progs start fighting for memory. An app server and database server might automatically grab way more than they need for home use. But other than that there should be no added strain from anything unless it is particularly busy. It'll depend on what operating system is being used too. An X-less *nix machine generally runs on virtually nothing. But with windows or X, a gig wouldn't hurt if it's not too hard to come by.
Click to expand...


well the machine itself will most definitely be a *nix machine and if removing X or any sort of graphical interface will make it run faster then I'll probably do that. I do plan on throwing SQL on it and any other open source equivalents to industry standards i.e. JBoss for the app server, Apache for http server. The machine itself will be powerful: possibly dual proc, minimum gig of ram with 2 being optimal, and a reasonable sized hardrive to start. Any interfacing to the server will be done either through my downloading machine using some sort of internal tunnel (kind of silly since I could just do command line stuff on the actual machine).

So effectively you guys are saying for a intranet with at most 2 users (I may write a program later to simulate X amount of users) one machine can run/act as the application server, database server, web server, and file server?
 
Originally posted by: DarrylLicke
Originally posted by: kamper
Originally posted by: skace
a 2 user web server / file server offers absolutely no burden. File serving does nothing unless someone is actively reading/writing something and with only 2 people... how often will that actually be. The web server is even less overhead (just reading no writing).

The only issue would be the app server functionality. If you start throwing SQL on it or something, the machine might start chugging (depending on how good it is).
Click to expand...
I guess you might run into problems where progs start fighting for memory. An app server and database server might automatically grab way more than they need for home use. But other than that there should be no added strain from anything unless it is particularly busy. It'll depend on what operating system is being used too. An X-less *nix machine generally runs on virtually nothing. But with windows or X, a gig wouldn't hurt if it's not too hard to come by.
Click to expand...


well the machine itself will most definitely be a *nix machine and if removing X or any sort of graphical interface will make it run faster then I'll probably do that. I do plan on throwing SQL on it and any other open source equivalents to industry standards i.e. JBoss for the app server, Apache for http server. The machine itself will be powerful: possibly dual proc, minimum gig of ram with 2 being optimal, and a reasonable sized hardrive to start. Any interfacing to the server will be done either through my downloading machine using some sort of internal tunnel (kind of silly since I could just do command line stuff on the actual machine).

So effectively you guys are saying for a intranet with at most 2 users (I may write a program later to simulate X amount of users) one machine can run/act as the application server, database server, web server, and file server?
Click to expand...

I would say so. In fact I think your machine seems a little overkill for only 2 users?
 
unless you have insane scripting/DB access (which you won't with 2 people) then you could get by on an x'less nix server, P2 500 with 256 MB ram...
 
Originally posted by: nweaver
unless you have insane scripting/DB access (which you won't with 2 people) then you could get by on an x'less nix server, P2 500 with 256 MB ram...
Click to expand...

Going off what you and screw3d are saying, I can scale back on the machine for the server. But what if I want to view movies or listen to music that is housed on the file server? Is that more an issue of the actual specs of the server, the bandwidth within the intranet, or the machine I'm making the file request from?

Hmm.....I can do this with a fairly cheap mb/proc set up it seems. Nice.
 
Originally posted by: DarrylLicke
Originally posted by: kamper
You can certainly put it all on one machine and, unless you're running a particularly heavy website you will really not need much power at all. Well, I guess if you're doing dev work and constantly restarting app servers it would help, but it's not necessary for serving content. Throw a database on there, a mail server, dns. It won't matter.
Click to expand...

No the website would be completely and totally internal so at most 2 users, if that. My only concern was whether a single machine could operate all those functions simultaneously. That seems to be the case so that is great.
Click to expand...

Of course! Multiple cores is only a recent thing... and multiple processors were only popular with higher end servers.
 
Originally posted by: DarrylLicke
Originally posted by: nweaver
unless you have insane scripting/DB access (which you won't with 2 people) then you could get by on an x'less nix server, P2 500 with 256 MB ram...
Click to expand...

Going off what you and screw3d are saying, I can scale back on the machine for the server. But what if I want to view movies or listen to music that is housed on the file server? Is that more an issue of the actual specs of the server, the bandwidth within the intranet, or the machine I'm making the file request from?

Hmm.....I can do this with a fairly cheap mb/proc set up it seems. Nice.
Click to expand...

If you are streaming video or music to a front end host you could use a samll server host. Pushing data is not a CPU intensive operation, unless you are moving massive amounts of data. If you plan on playing movies directly, just get a hardware mpeg decoder card. You should be able to get away with a 5-600MHz machine for server purposes.

Also this is more of a general hardware question. 🙂
 
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