# First Server Ever Need help



## M3k5 (Apr 9, 2019)

Hello guys i just register on the forum and it seems that a lot of you guys are experts so I have some questions I will explain what I want to do on my server and I'm hoping you guys will help me chose the right hardware. Not Price and low consumption is a must.

So far my pick was this one https://www.pcdiga.com/motherboard-gigabyte-j3455n-d3h
A integrate cpu motherboard and I think will be enough but if you guys don't agreed plz give some options instead.

What im going to do:
1 Web Dev This Include Web Hosting  (A Portfolio website with my projects) (Ecommerce website)(A Blog)
2 Mail server service / Sql / Php Firewall ... 
4 Git server
3 File Storage
4 Cloud Service 
5 Backups

Thats all...  I will use mainly docker for all this. want to get on containers instead of vw.

What kind of hardware you guys think im gonna to need??? Is that bundle enough???


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## ralphbsz (Apr 9, 2019)

Looked up the specs on the link you pointed to; fortunately, I speak spanish!  

It depends on work load.  You say "web ... hosting": At what scale?  For one personal web site, with low traffic (IO is coming over a slow broadband or DSL connection), it will definitely be enough.  For competing with Google or Amazon, it will definitely not be enough.  Similar with mail server: It is for your personal e-mail, or including a few family members or friends (say 50 or 100 mail messages per day), that's no problem at all.  You will not be able to be faster than Gmail or Hotmail with that hardware.

I don't know what you mean by "cloud service", that could be anything.  Clearly, you won't be hosting dozens or millions of virtual machines on your box, and you are not the next Jeff Bezos or the next AWS.  But putting a few jails or VMs on there should be easy.

For comparison, here is the server I have at home (and which is available as a web server from the public internet, although very well hidden): A 4-core 32-bit Atom running at 1.8GHz each, with effectively 3GB of memory.  Internal network is 100baseT, external network is a 45MBit DSL connection from the phone company (upload is 1/10th the speed).  I have a tiny boot SSD (I think 32gig), and two 4TB data disks, plus an external backup disk.  I run a web server, a little bit of mail (most mail is handled by an ISP), git/mercurial/cvs source control, a few ZFS file systems, some exported via NFS, used to run a Samba server but haven't repaired the setup in about 5 years, and run an automatic backup system.  Plus some hardware monitoring of home systems (pumps, well, temperatures, weather station).  Total load on the system is: it is mostly idle.

My advice for hardware configuration would be to not focus too much on CPU and RAM; today that's generous for most use cases.  Where people really feel performance is a fast boot/OS disk (recommend an SSD there), and having enough disk capacity that is redundant.  A pair of good spinning hard drives of the multiple TB class, set up to be redundant (RAID, for example using ZFS) I think is the sweet spot in the capacity/reliability/cost optimization.


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## Phishfry (Apr 9, 2019)

I agree with everything Ralph said.
I personally like Gigabyte boards. I bought a MX-33 with a Xeon and it's 2 years old and still kicking.
The UD line is good for the consumer boards. All solid state caps.
A consumer board can make for a good first server but Docker on something so skinny is going to be a challenge.
8GB max ram and only 4 cores. No HT.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/u...n-processor-j3455-2m-cache-up-to-2-3-ghz.html

I really don't think your first server should be virtual but bare metal. Master one server at a time.
You might want a seperate fileserver and webserver. Isolate the processes. Run the mail/webserver in a DMZ.


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## M3k5 (Apr 10, 2019)

Humm... Is just to figure out this new world eventually if I need more power I will just buy another machine. One more thing I just find this deal on eBay 









						FUJITSU Server PRIMERGY TX120 S3p Turm Server for sale online | eBay
					

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for FUJITSU Server PRIMERGY TX120 S3p Turm Server at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!



					rover.ebay.com
				




I think I’m going for it. Will be a cheaper way because I don’t have any hardware at all. And eventually on this option... I can upgrade. Not much just the processor something like a Xeon 1260l 8 thread will be nice and go further on ram if needed.

If I want another machine I will have the case the ram and the drives...

Good idea???


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## Ordoban (Apr 10, 2019)

I would not just look on CPU and RAM power. For a home used server I would listen to more criteria:
- Power consumtion: (that's also Heat radiation!) Over years of running a too strong server there can be a lot of money just turned to heat. Older Hardware often needs more electric power.
- Reliability: Do you really need super solid expensive enterprice hardware who never fails? Or is it ok to run cheap consumer electronic who can fail one time? Remember, you can also use a simple PC as server!
- Noise: Server hardware is made for reliability and power, not for using in the living room. Spinning 15k disks and lot of fans are damn loud!


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## justinnoor (Apr 10, 2019)

One thing that bit me was my ISP. Do some research on your ISP. When you purchase internet service, especially DSL, your ISP will provide you with a gateway/router device. There’s usually no way around it. Be sure that the device allows you to put other devices in a DMZ, or supports a full bridge mode, or you will run into problems.

Also, your internet service comes with a public IP address. Find out whether or not that address is static or dynamic. There’s a good chance it will be dynamic, which means your IP address will change. If that happens, your sites will go down until you update everything. There are some services out there that will monitor this for you which makes life easier, such as DynDNS or NoIP. I like DynDNS.

Happy research!

[EDIT]

I recently built my first bare metal server as well. I’m still not finished with it, and I still don’t know what I am doing. But it’s very rewarding when you figure things out and make progress. Don’t get overwhelmed. Break it down into small steps, and tackle each step one-by-one.


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## SirDice (Apr 10, 2019)

justinnoor said:


> There’s a good chance it will be dynamic, which means your IP address will change.


A lot of ISPs use some sort of middle-ground. While my ISP gives me a _dynamic_ IP, it rarely changes. In the past 5 years I think it changed only once or twice. I usually find out because it breaks my HE.net IPv6 tunnel and as a consequence I lose IPv6 connectivity. 



M3k5 said:


> I will use mainly docker for all this.


This pretty much excludes using FreeBSD. Use Linux if you insist on docker. 




M3k5 said:


> I'm hoping you guys will help me chose the right hardware.


Why not go for a cheap VPS? Usually a guaranteed 99.999% uptime, no hardware maintenance, no electricity bill, no noise and no worries about dynamic IPs and dodgy home connections. Also note that most home xDSL or Cable internet connections only have 10% upstream, i.e. if your internet connection is 100Mbit/s, your upstream will only be 10Mbit/s (~1 MByte/s). And for running a server on your home connection your upstream speed is more important than your downstream (a typical server has to _send_ data to the internet).


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## ucomp (Apr 10, 2019)

M3k5 said:


> ... Primergy...
> Good idea???



Yes and No 
Yes because the "fat" Primergys(5HU e.g.) are best choice for home use because they produce not half the noise of a 1HU .

No, because when you realize that SirDice is  right ;-) ( DSL+homeCable=bad upstream, unstable connections, high electricity bills...) and you'll move your bare metal server to colocate in a datacenter  you have to pay per height unit ( so for a 5HU:  5 times more than for a 1HU).
--

Docker ?  wrong forum here , but the good news is that you don't need docker to run the services of your choice


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## ralphbsz (Apr 10, 2019)

SirDice is right about the limitations of consumer DSL: It has low upstream speed.  We pay a lot of money (US-$70/month) for getting 40-45Mbit/s download speed, and our upload speed is pretty accurately 1/10th of that.  With the cheap DSL service of 3Mbit/s, you only get 300kBit/s = about 30kByte/s of upload.  If you are running a machine at home as a server, the bandwidth you are serving to the internet is the upload speed, and that's very slow or expensive or both.  And the problem of consumer DSL changing IP addresses also exists.  That can be worked around; at home I use a mickey-mouse solution (I have a little python script that monitors my IP address, and send me an e-mail when it changes, then I edit the DNS manually), but that's obviously insane.  You can configure dynamic DNS solutions, but that's extra hassle, and I don't know whether any free dynamic DNS services still exist.

From that viewpoint, going with the cloud is a much better idea.  If you go to Amazon, Google or Microsoft, you can get a very small FreeBSD virtual machine for free; some of those providers have a program where they give you the first year of a medium-size machine for free, others have a program where a tiny machine is always free.  I have one of those (currently at Google, previously used one at Amazon), and it works extremely boringly well.  It just has very little storage (a few dozen GB), but that's all I need for my external machine.  I could rent more storage, but then it wouldn't be free forever.

But I think the real question is the premise that you actually need a computer, and that you want to install and configure that computer.  I was talking at lunch with colleagues (all computer professionals who work at one of the large IT companies, and all have many years of experience), and over half of the colleagues no longer have a "computer" at home.  Instead, they have laptops and tablets.  For all the things that require a server, they just use canned services.  For example, for e-mail they use a cloud e-mail provider, for source control something like github or a competitor, one colleague uses source control as his backup system (he simply checks every file into git), others use cloud-based backup services.  For long-term document storage, go with any of the cloud providers (DropBox is popular), and leave your files there.  It ends up being way cheaper and more reliable than having your own machine.  If you live in an area where you have good (cheap and fast) internet service at home, and/or you have good data service on your cell phone / tablet, this seems like a great idea.


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## ralphbsz (Apr 10, 2019)

ucomp said:


> No, because when you realize that SirDice is  right ;-) ( DSL+homeCable=bad upstream, unstable connections, high electricity bills...) and you'll move your bare metal server to colocate in a datacenter  you have to pay per height unit ( so for a 5HU:  5 times more than for a 1HU).


My impression is that colocate is de-facto dead for small customers who want to deploy just one or a handful machines.  Renting a virtual machine (VPS) is much better and cheaper for that size of service.  Where colo is interesting is when you have 1 or 5 whole racks of machines, and you can forklift your rack into a pre-built space with good power, cooling, and network.  Not common for hobbyists.


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## dieselriot (Apr 11, 2019)

@ralphbzs I doubt you actually speak spanish, else you'd recognize that as anything but 

I'm not trying to be mean, it's just a bit offensive when people assume spanish and portuguese are the same thing.


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## ralphbsz (Apr 11, 2019)

I'm sorry ... didn't look carefully enough.
The front page of my passport actually says "Republica Federative do Brasil".  Embarrassing.


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## justinnoor (Apr 11, 2019)

ralphbsz said:


> I'm sorry ... didn't look carefully enough.



Portuguese and Spanish are very similar. It is generally not considered offensive to make that mistake.


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