Motherboard for Fedora server

[Andrew W. Donoho]

Folks,

	I just put together a nice small home mail server using FC2.

1	Soltek EQ-3801 Barebones Small Form Factor		$289.00
		(NVidia NForce3 250 Gb chipset)
		(1000baseT, 1394, USB 2.0, 5.1 sound)
		(Very Quiet, Reviewed at AnandTech)
1	AMD Athlon 64 2800 							$169.00
		(OEM, fan included in barebone system)
		(Recent price reductions -> $130.00)
2	Corsair VS512MB400C3 DDR 400 DRAM			$160.00
1	Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 120 GB ATA100			$93.50
1	Sapphire Radeon VE-7000 AGP card				$32.00
	Total (Shipping Included):						$743.50

Reused existing monitor and kbd/m for FC2 installation.

In specific, my commercial email package, CommuniGate Pro, added 
support for AMD64 and FC2 had good support for the processor. 
Therefore, I took the plunge. I did have a few problems. NVidia support 
for the 2.6 kernel was not quite all there when I started. Then NVidia 
released new drivers that worked on the 2.6.5 FC2 kernel. Upgrading to 
the 2.6.8 FC2 kernel broke the nvnet drivers. To let things settle 
down, I have temporarily installed a Tulip derived 100baseTX card. In 
addition to CommuniGate Pro, I have installed DJB's dnscache, netatalk 
and howl. Overall, I am very happy moving to FC2 from RH9. In addition, 
I moved up to using the LVM service for my hard drives. This has 
allowed me to add a second drive as an extension to the main drive (184 
GB total). I've written up my HOWTO recipe and it has been published at 
FedoraNews.org. I've got room for one more drive in the box. I'm 
waiting for NVidia to settle down a bit more and then I'll try out a 
new 200+ GB SATA drive. Perhaps I'll figure out LVM striping by then.

Overall, I've had a good experience with FC2. I'm still confused about 
why Redhat did not want to continue taking my money for RHN access when 
I am essentially getting the same thing from them for free from the 
Fedora community. In any event, I've written a HOWTO and I'll write 
some more as my FC2 experience develops and time allows.

Andrew

____________________________________
Andrew W. Donoho
awd at DDG.com, PGP Key ID: 0x81D0F250
+1 (512) 453-6652 (o), +1 (512) 750-7596 (m)


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