AKLUG mirror server

Good evening, everybody.
An idea was hatched tonight at the meeting: An AKLUG mirror server.

Instead of placing the burden on Damien each week for getting his mirror
up to date and bringing it in, we'd gather some hardware and set up a
server to put mirror and other data on.

For far, we have:

Antec Case with 350W power supply (Thanks, Jim Wadell)
Motherboard and processor (Thanks, guy who's name I don't know and Jim
Wadell)
2, 2GB 68pin SCSI drives and cable (Thanks, Adam Bultman)
Adaptec 3940 SCSI Card (Thanks, Adam Bultman (and jim wadell for giving
one to me))
SCSI CDROM (Thanks, Adam Bultman) with converter
Video Card (Thanks, Adam Bultman)

What else we need:

RAM - 133 MHz, 168 pin SDRAM. As much as possible. There are three RAM
slots.
Ethernet Card: Ideally two or three for more throughput (multiple IP
addresses or ethernet bonding)
Hard drives: Since the boot drives (RAID1) and CDROM are SCSI, we'll
have four open IDE slots. We would like to ideally *buy* some IDE
drives, as large as possible. There are always deals at the local chain
stores that we can take advantage of and hopefully get something like
300G in there.
Distro recommendations: I lean towards either centos or ubuntu. Any
recommendations are accepted.
Wade and Jim Gribbin have offered up some RAM to put into the machine.
If I can get RAM for it sooner rather than later, I can have the OS on
the server by next Friday. The larger the sticks of ram, the better.
64s would be fine, but 128s would be better. If somebody wants to
arrange a time with me to pick up some RAM, I'll run down and pick it up.

 If people offer to pony up dough (I'll kick in like, 25 bucks or
something) somebody can pick up a drive and we can start getting the
mirror set up next week. The more money, the better. We can get a few
decently sized drives and use LVM. The smaller drives (you know,
10-40G) probably aren't all that useful, since 4 drives at 40G would be
easily filled with the mirrors of just a few distributions. I'm not
really thinking we need to worry about RAID1, since the system will be
kinda slow (733 MHz, if we can get 133 MHz RAM) and ide-based.

The plan was to try to convince Jon Reynolds to "host" it in his cubicle
or something. It sits under the desk with a local IP address, runs an
http and nfs server that we can connect to each week . It won't be
available to the outside world, so hopefully it won't get cracked or
something. Somebody could keep it updated by setting up the mirror
scripts to run each night late at night.

What else would be needed is an admin. I'm sure we have many capable
admins here available and willing to help admin the box. It also might
give some of the newer people to linux an excellent way of cutting their
teeth and getting a bit more familiar with both administration and linux.
 
If we are daring, and put the system on the internet (say, on an off
port, with ssh keys as the only way of getting in, in order to minmize
the possibility of getting broken into) we could allow people to get in
during the week and test out new programs, perhaps making sandboxes for
people to install and test new programs or daemons and use it as a way
of perhaps preparing additional material for presentations...

Let me know what you think; what you might have to donate or want to
help out with.

Adam
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Received on Fri Sep 23 23:04:16 2005