- Dec 17, 2001
- 3,566
- 3
- 81
I'm in the position of pretending I'm an IT professional at the high school I work at, which doesn't have the money to hire a full time tech or a consulting firm. My principal wants email for the faculty (about 200 people). Many users already have some other ISP, so this would not likely be their primary mail server - only a couple dozen users would have a significant load. Also, most faculty do not have a classroom computer, so I'll need to set up a webmail frontend for use from shared Win9x workstations. My plan is to go with a Linux server running qmail and one of the open webmail programs (haven't decided which yet - suggestions appreciated).
First order of business is building the box. I know... it's nice to have commercial hardware support for important machines. But that would mean the box would have to purchased through the board of ed, which in Chicago means multi-month delays, cheapo vendor restrictions, and occasional non-delivery, since many vendors no longer accept our credit (which is pretty damn sad). But we can buy parts with our own money through our choice of vendor to circumvent this. So what do I need? A cheap processor will do. What about memory? A regular qmail installation requires little, but how much will serving up webmail add to this? Most importantly, what about storage choices and configuration? Since this is a small server and I'm shooting for cheap, I was thinking about D740X's in linux software RAID 1 - I recall reading at SR that the Maxtors were the best performing IDE's under server-type access patterns. Is that adequate as far as reliability and access times? How much capacity will I need? Any other important components I should consider?
Many thanks for any input you can provide...
First order of business is building the box. I know... it's nice to have commercial hardware support for important machines. But that would mean the box would have to purchased through the board of ed, which in Chicago means multi-month delays, cheapo vendor restrictions, and occasional non-delivery, since many vendors no longer accept our credit (which is pretty damn sad). But we can buy parts with our own money through our choice of vendor to circumvent this. So what do I need? A cheap processor will do. What about memory? A regular qmail installation requires little, but how much will serving up webmail add to this? Most importantly, what about storage choices and configuration? Since this is a small server and I'm shooting for cheap, I was thinking about D740X's in linux software RAID 1 - I recall reading at SR that the Maxtors were the best performing IDE's under server-type access patterns. Is that adequate as far as reliability and access times? How much capacity will I need? Any other important components I should consider?
Many thanks for any input you can provide...
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