whats the hardware needed for a server
 

if i want to make a movie's server for my college LAN... what's the hardware ill need?
lets say ill need about 300gb hdd for starters and at peak i expect about 40 ppl dlding/streaming video from it
would windows server2003 be idle for ir?(im a linux n00b)

also...if i dont buy a moniter for it...ill setup remote desktop on it to administer it...any easier way?

40 people is a lot without some serious output on your network pipe. Depending on your campus network connection, you're going to need gigabit if you have it, or multiple 100mbps connections.

You should also cap downloads too.

SCSI hard drives would be a good idea, or RAIDed Serial ATA. You don't want only a couple hard drives doing all the work.

CPU power isn't really an issue, a decent Athlon or P4 should be sufficient. 512mb RAM would probably be enough as well. You're really just doing file transfers.

Actually, you might be better off with more than one PC.

It all depends on your budget and the campus network!

ps... remote desktop is a good way to admin a box you're not using every day. I use it on my home network very successfully. An alternative is VNC. Its open source, so there's a few different flavors, my favorite is TightVNC.

What kinda movie server?
If you're going for a professional style server, then look at probably a SCSI setup with RAID if you need redundancy. Also, you'll probably want to check on getting multiple NIC's in it because you might be able to have two connections for people, or one for administation and one for sending.
I'd personally set up probably just a simple XP box with filesharing. Depends on the amount of security that you want.
Also, as I said above, it all depends on the movies also, because if you are doing ripped DVD's, they'll catch on that you're spreading stuff, they'll drop your connection like nuthin depending on the schools rules. If you are a student, try talking with the people in the Information Tech dept if you plan on running legit movies or what not, and they'll be able to suggest things that would fit better and such. I know here at my school, spreading mp3's is grounds for dismissal from the school.

we have a 10MBps line everywhere...
i guess streaming vid is out...only downloading with 1 thread/user
anti-piracy laws r as stringent in india as ....cant think of nething :P
gimme details about RAID...
it needs 2 hdds to work right? how does raid help in fast read/write
how much of a difference is there between sata and scsi?
whats multiple NIC?

Well, you're kinda limited with 10Mbps, thats about 1 Megabyte per second with overhead, give or take. You have to consider what bitrate your streaming video is.

If you want to try to stream to a few different people, you're going to be... ...buffering... ...buffering... ...buffering...

-SF

Not to mention all of the 'other' network traffic already whizzing by on the lines. You would have a big impact on the rest of the 'network neighborhood'

all I can say is "watch the fuck out." down here in the deep south, you get ass-raped if you are caught transfering media over the network. we're talking "bring the student in front of judicial review" status here.


I'd get some SATA Raptors or something.

piracy laws here r non existant so dont worry about that...

so what i understand is:
athlon 1800
512 ram
3*100gb raid sata hdd's

You could go all out and spend $3000 on an uber server, or $1000 on three or four smaller servers that would probably do a better job.

And just use remote desktop to administer them. That way you don't need any hardare other than the box!

But yeah, 10Mbps lines... ...if there is competing traffic it will be hard to send anything fast!

What is a raid going to do for you when you can only put out 1 megabyte a second?? 3 drives in raid can put out like 50-100 megs a sec, buffered.

But putting that on a 10Mbps line is like driving a corvette down a sidewalk.

-SF

Hey, I was able to drive a decent speed down there until the cops showed up ;)

that just goes to show u i have no idea of what raids can do

i've dropped the idea for a streaming server..it will be a storage/download server only...so i guess speed limit doesnt matter in this case

in raid...is a hdd mirrored on another or something?

If its just a general purpose server, that isnt going to have a lot of traffic, just go find an old used machine. Doesnt have to be powerful--I have a p2 400 with 128MB of RAM that is more than powerful enough to serve my webpage and any files I want to serve off of it too.

Your bottleneck is going to be your network connection, not the server.

I use a AMD K6-2 400 with 256MB PC-100 RAM, a single 60GB HDD, on my 100Mbps LAN. It's mainly just a file server, and I'll stream movies and music to other PC's on the LAN, but that's about it.

I'd like to set up a website on it, instead of dealing with online web hosting services with bandwidth limitations, and storage capacity limits.