My first/Your first server

[PCTC2]

Not really sure why exactly but personally i've been preferring Xen server over Esxi recently. Well for home machines and screwing around at work anyway.

I'd also give that a try along with esxi

I forgot about Citrix XenServer. I used it for a few months before it stopped responding to the control program one day. It's a great program. As with ESXi, you need supported hardware. It gives you a little more ability when it comes to the local console, but the Windows client for both is pretty decent. Both are available for free. So try them both!

 

[Fallen Kell]

I would say put FreeBSD on it as the base OS, and if you want to do something else, setup a virtual machine to run that.

 

[Squeept]

My first server was several hundred pounds. I stole (saved) a MicroVAX from the university I was at when I was working in the engineering department. I had to build a custom 6 wire phone cable to use a terminal program to talk to it. I eventually gutted it, sold the spare parts on eBay, and traded (for a case of beer) the massive, lockable chassis to my friend to use it as the geekiest liquor cabinet ever.

 

[ultimatebob]

Hmm... The first "server" I ever built was a 200 MHz Pentium with 128 MB of memory, running a bootleg copy Windows 2000 Advanced Server with IIS installed. I built it for a school report I was working on about web servers and FTP servers.

I'm not sure what the first one I built for work was... probably a Lotus Domino server running under Windows NT 4. I didn't get into UNIX (AIX/Linux) until late 2001.

Nowadays, I'd probably build something with CentOS.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

The specs on my first server, when the first iteration of it was finished. Was quite proud -- building a dual Xeon server that I had been dreaming of for ~8 years. Ever since I heard of Xeon processors, I wanted to build one. Sadly, this guts of this build were sold a couple years back for a PhysX card (it was just short of giving it to her for free -- I wasn't using that hardware anymore). Now what sits in the same case is a Gigabit mobo and a Intel 2140 CPU, with Windows Home Server on it, and 18TB of hd space.

Enermax FS2300B case, 23-bay
Seasonic 600w PSU
Seasonic 500w PSU
SuperMicro X5DAE mobo
(2) Xeon 2.66 GHz w/ HT
(2) Thermalright SX-9XV HSF
(4) Corsair 512mb PC2100 ECC registered DDR
(2) Supermicro 5-disk / 3-bay SATA enclosure
RAIDCore BC4852 8-port RAID controller, PCI-X (64-bit @ 133MHz)
(6) Hitachi 250gb 8mb SATA (RAID 5)
(2) Hitachi 160gb 8mb hd, SATA (RAID 0)
Western Digital 120gb 8mb hd, IDE
Lite-On CD-RW, 48X/24X/48X
Lite-On DVDRW DL, 16X
ThermalTake Hardcano 13
Western Digital 120gb 8mb hd, 1394 (external)
(2) ViewSonic VX922 19" LCD monitor, 2ms
(8) 92x25mm fans
(2) 92x38mm fans
(2) 120x38mm fans

 

[Paperlantern]

FIRST server was a PII 350MHz box with 256MB RAM and a 10GB HDD. Was running Win XP Pro. Basically it was my primary box up until about 2002 when a friend unloaded a Thunderbird 850MHz on me. I used the 850 as my primary box at that point and tinkered with the 350 running a few various games. One was Quake III, and later Enemy Territory. Had a couple servers that me and a few friends played on, but couldnt get more than a few people on em before they got laggy.

Retired that server in 2004 when i upgraded the Thunderbird to a Athlon 2600+ at 1.9GHz. That made the Thunderbird was our new server. Ran a web server on that with gallery on it (still on Win XP Pro) for the better part of 4 years, had thousands of pictures on it, never went down except for power outages that lasted longer than the UPS could allow. Upgraded it to Server 2003 in early 2009ish, ran great for a year or so, almost 2 until mid this year when i finally said okay, we dont use gallery much anymore, its dated, let me gut this thing and upgrade to the newest old stuff i have laying around.

By now Ive gotten many older parts laying around, and a Athlon 2800+ with 1.5GB memory was sitting in a drawer, so i gutted it again and replaced the old thunderbird. A friend and I have an FTP server on it, and eventually it got to the point where it would suck if we lost it, so I put a 3 in 2 drive cage in it and installed a RAID controller to RAID 5 together three 1TB drives. I also have a Minecraft server on it, but i'm looking to get some 1GB sticks of DDR400 memory before i run it permanently. Anyone got any laying around?

 

[pitz]

Pentium-66 (that's not a mistake, good ol 5V chips and no mobo PSU's, lol), a pair of 2gb SCSI drives, 24mb RAM, and Slackware 7 was my first 'server'. Ran Samba. Held my MP3's, managed my email, and ran a small webserver. Also had a firewall/NAT running on there through iptables.

Eventually was upgraded to a P133, Pentium-233, Celeron-300, Pentium 3-450, Pentium-3-600, Pentium3-800, AthlonC-1333, AthlonXP-2500+, and finally, today, a Phenom II X2 (12gb RAM, 4.5Tb HDDs), and Slackware 13.

Ubuntu really is a bloated pig for stuff like this. I would highly recommend that you try something like Slackware instead. For a server, you really want to stay away from GUI's, or at least, the GUI should be something that's only fired up on special occasions. And if you're learning, GUI's and graphical admin tools are terrible things to have around...

 

[Crusty]

Pentium-66 (that's not a mistake, good ol 5V chips and no mobo PSU's, lol), a pair of 2gb SCSI drives, 24mb RAM, and Slackware 7 was my first 'server'. Ran Samba. Held my MP3's, managed my email, and ran a small webserver. Also had a firewall/NAT running on there through iptables.

Eventually was upgraded to a P133, Pentium-233, Celeron-300, Pentium 3-450, Pentium-3-600, Pentium3-800, AthlonC-1333, AthlonXP-2500+, and finally, today, a Phenom II X2 (12gb RAM, 4.5Tb HDDs), and Slackware 13.

Ubuntu really is a bloated pig for stuff like this. I would highly recommend that you try something like Slackware instead. For a server, you really want to stay away from GUI's, or at least, the GUI should be something that's only fired up on special occasions. And if you're learning, GUI's and graphical admin tools are terrible things to have around...

Ubuntu Server edition does not install a GUI by default.

 

[sourceninja]

Ubuntu Server edition does not install a GUI by default.

I love ubuntu server. I run about 50 servers all running ubuntu server. I especially love their option of minimal install for vm. It is about as stripped down as possible (I've even been frustrated now and then when tools I want such as man need to be installed) and is great for building virtual apps for other's to deploy.

Honestly, given the choice I wouldn't use anything else.

 

[Evadman]

I guess my first server would be the BBS that I ran on renegade. those were good times.

 

[combust3r]

My first server was samba file/printer/gateway on Mandrake 9.0.

 

[Ka0t1x]

I don't mean to interrupt on the OP.. but a few posts here are related to Xen/ESXi ..

Would I be able to build a storage array server ontop of them? 10-12Tb Raid 5(or6) and have most of it be for a single VM with fileserver in mind?

I would love the option to enable VM's via Xen similar to a VPS... without dealing with a host system in the process.

 

[idea]

my first server came about when i gave my old celeron 566 combo a new life by installing my first copy of slackware linux. i already had some experience using unix via hacked shells from my friends on IRC.

it was upgraded several times and by the time ubuntu server got popular i was really tired of configure ; make ; make install so i decided to switch. linux has come a long way.

i currently run two machines at home. one is a beastly VMWare ESXi 4.1 and the other is a low powered OpenSolaris SAN/NAS server with 8 sata disk ZFS RAID-Z.