Why choose linux over NT for server?

rudeboymcc

rudeboymcc

rudeboymcc

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Hi. I've got an old computer (athlonxp 800mhz,512ram) and want to make it into a server. I'm gonna put 1 terrabyte of hard disks in there, and have it serve movies, music (through itunes) and maybe a printer to maximum 5 computers.

At first I thought linux. I'm quite happy using it but not good enough to say install gentoo without a lot of reading.

Then i thought why not just install windos NT on it? I know exactly how ot use it, I can't see there being much of a performance difference for my needs, and I know all the hardware etc will work with it easily.

Is there anything you can think of why I should use Linux instead of windows?

One thing i'm not sure about is which windows is the latets NT one. is it still 2003 or is XP capable of doing it all?
 
Whatever works.

For my personal use, license costs would be the major issue, and having to reactivate whenever I change hardware (I've had to reactive Windows simply from adding a HD, before).

You can boot from Linux software RAID (unlike Windows Server 'dynamic disks' RAID) and it is also hardware transparent - replace the HD controllers/motherboard/HD's, and it doesn't care - unlike proprietry on-disk metadata formats used by hardware RAID cards.
 
well I won't actually be usign RAID. I have though about it and did end up buying two same model 250g hard disks but in the end I figured it's not important data so i'd rather have the space.

apart form raid and costs is that it?

somethign i was thinking of was spyware and viruses with windows but if i'm not browsig the internet and msn isn;'t installed then there shouldn't be a problem right? is there any way to actually disable internet access to that computer? it will be running through a netgear router.
 
Use a static IP with no default gateway set, it will have no route to the Internet, nor will it respond to any packets outside its subnet.
 
rudeboymcc said:
Then i thought why not just install windos NT on it? I know exactly how ot use it, I can't see there being much of a performance difference for my needs, and I know all the hardware etc will work with it easily.

Is there anything you can think of why I should use Linux instead of windows?

One thing i'm not sure about is which windows is the latets NT one. is it still 2003 or is XP capable of doing it all?
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Depends one what you're trying to achieve. On old hardware like you're talking about I would NOT reccomend win2003 or XP; go with Win2k if you're chucking windows on it. The former are way too system resource intesive.

Linux wise for servers I'd reccomend Ubuntu at the moment, or possibly at the outside FreeBSD.

Of course it all comes down to exactly what you want to achieve with it.

Do you have direct access to the server regularly? How bothered are you by the prospect of having to reboot it?

IME working in a data centre with literally hundreds upon hundreds of servers running 24x7; its the Windows boxes that need the most number of reboots and work. One customer of ours came to visit the datacentre for the first time in over 3 years. In all that time he'd had a Linux server up and running away happily, 24x7x365. The only reason he had to turn up was because the server had had a hardware failure.

I love linux. As a server OS I reckon there is very little out there that can hold a candle to it in terms of stability and performance. HOWEVER it really does require you to know what you're doing. If you're not confident with Linux then Windows is possibly the best bet for you. Another of our customers has issues with his server being used as a spam relay. He has no grasp of Linux, just the webmin backend he uses for administering the server. Trying to get him to understand why he's having the issues he is and why its his responsibility (its co-location, not a managed server), and what he should do about it is extremely difficult. The golden rule of thumb should always be, if its an important server, or internet facing, don't put on it what you don't know how to support.

I'm fiddling about with my Linux box at the moment, looking at Media stuff. MythTV is integrating quite nicely with its setup; Samba is happily hosting the media files so the rest of the network can see them; next step for me is to look at IceCasting files.

There are lots of guides out there for Ubuntu, like this site: http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Edgy

Whatever you're trying to achieve I'm sure people will have done before :)
 
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Well the server's gonna be in my house so reboots aren't a problem at all and I know how to configure windows really well so I think windows it is!.

One thing I have just rememberd is the machine doesn't haev sata and the two drives I have are SATA II. if I get a pci sata contorller will it be nearly as fast as if the ports were built onto the motherbaorD?

Also when choosing a windows, what advantages would i have if i got WIndows server 2003 over windows XP? It's not going to haev different user permissions so shall i just stick with XP?
 
rudeboymcc said:
One thing I have just rememberd is the machine doesn't haev sata and the two drives I have are SATA II. if I get a pci sata contorller will it be nearly as fast as if the ports were built onto the motherbaorD?
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It won't be as fast, onboard SATA controllers are generally wired straight to the PCIe bus so have access to greater bandwidth (than regular PCI, not PCI-e cards). In real-world use, you're unlikely to notice unless copying/moving gigs and gigs every hour. I personally use an el-cheapo Highpoint 4-port RAID card, with 4 drives, in my home linux fileserver, configured as a RAID-5 array (software RAID), and I get over 55MB/sec. Acceptable for streaming movies and music, but perhaps not acceptable for online storage of DV video editing.

rudeboymcc said:
Also when choosing a windows, what advantages would i have if i got WIndows server 2003 over windows XP? It's not going to haev different user permissions so shall i just stick with XP?
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Windows XP and Windows 2003 (Standard and Web edition) use the same kernel with a few changes in drivers and support for things like active directory, they're very similar otherwise. Windows XP limits the number of simultaneous SMB sessions to 10, Windows 2003 doesn't, but you need CALs (client access licenses) to do it (legally). Samba on Linux supports as many connections as can fit into RAM (1000's), for free :p

Windows 2003 has better Remote Desktop support than Windows XP, 2 users can be logged-in simulatanously on Windows 2003 Standard, and can support more with Terminal Services.

I'd say the usefulness for Windows 2003 Server over XP is only when you're providing services to more than 10 users on a network at the same time, or if Active Directory is important to you. Otherwise, go for XP.

edit: Just an example - at work we have four Perforce servers (source control) all running on XP (inside VMware) used for production work, and it has performed admirably for well over a year. Over 30 people access it every day, and it transfers over a terabyte every week. There was no need for it to be Windows 2003 because we would have not used any of Windows 2003's features. It could equally have been on Linux, but then the people who need to login to it to change things would need to know a little about Linux (they don't)
 
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Linux will be faster than any flavour of Windows Nt on that hardware spec. The disadvantage might be more that your preferred server applications may not work. Personally I won't use Windows as a server although being absolutely fair I won't use Linux either (Unix - not Linux - is the way to go if you want true security and reliability).
 
MikeTimbers said:
(Unix - not Linux - is the way to go if you want true security and reliability).
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Off topic, but what flavour of Unix do you prefer, and why?

I respect Solaris and its clustering features, and especially ZFS, but have limited success with hardware compatibility in the past (mainly crappy SATA chipsets, but hey, they work in Linux/Winblows)
 
I was looking at freenas at first which is UNIX but it';s literlally just a NAS and it can't serve to itunes and doesn't support sata so isn't an option.

are there any others you can recommend that are actually servers? and what's the difference between linux and unix? is it the dos of linux?
 
matja said:
Off topic, but what flavour of Unix do you prefer, and why?
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Well, I'm a qualified SCO engineer (from :cough: 1989 :cough: ) and have a huge respect for AIX having worked with that since the original IBM RT PC but I mostly work with Solaris on SPARC. I'm currently putting together over 60 Sun servers for a new website using Sun's T1000 and T2000 servers which think they have 32 virtual cpus! There will also be some Opteron-based Suns which will be interesting as I've never used them before.

Solaris 10 has very mature processes although some of the re-work they've done has left some interesting open doors (google for "telnet -l -froot" for a real horror). Dtrace is a fantastic tool for determining what your system is really doing.

For those who want to try a "real" Unix on X86, Solaris 10 X64 should work well on any Athlon64/Opteron server but don't expect the same kind of Desktop-orientated UI as it is very clearly a Server OS.
 
rudeboymcc said:
and what's the difference between linux and unix? is it the dos of linux?
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Unix is what Linux is a copy of. not to disrespect Linux because what it does, it does extraordinarily well and has done a huge amount to bring Unix to ordinary computers but for a Server OS - although Linux is getting better every day - I would always prefer to go with Unix which has been around in various forms since the late 1960s. Real Unix is almost impossible to kill and the major versions have fault tolerance built in. This is largely down to the very expensive hardware it runs on but the OS itself has to be able to cope with that.

For example, I have a lot of legacy Sun kit which despite being a ten-year-old design is capable of staying operational when memory chips fail or even when cpus break. AIX has some very clever stuff and has had for years; SMIT is an excellent menu-driven system management tool which at the end, once you've found what you want to do, it obviously does what you wanted but also tells you what the command-line would have been so you can make a note of it and use the command-line next time.
 
MikeTimbers said:
Unix is what Linux is a copy of. not to disrespect Linux because what it does, it does extraordinarily well and has done a huge amount to bring Unix to ordinary computers but for a Server OS - although Linux is getting better every day - I would always prefer to go with Unix which has been around in various forms since the late 1960s. Real Unix is almost impossible to kill and the major versions have fault tolerance built in. This is largely down to the very expensive hardware it runs on but the OS itself has to be able to cope with that.

For example, I have a lot of legacy Sun kit which despite being a ten-year-old design is capable of staying operational when memory chips fail or even when cpus break. AIX has some very clever stuff and has had for years; SMIT is an excellent menu-driven system management tool which at the end, once you've found what you want to do, it obviously does what you wanted but also tells you what the command-line would have been so you can make a note of it and use the command-line next time.
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I respect your opinion but I'm not sure it's as big a deal anymore. I work for an ISP and we're in the process of removing our old solaris authoratitive dns servers and replaceing them with red hat enterprise on HP hardware.

maybe it lacks the absolute fault tolerence but HP guarentee that faults with hardware are fixed within 6 hours of our call and there are 4 servers live, so i'll take the cheaper linux option as I can't see a disadvantage.

that said, the solaris hardware is 3 years old and will still be redeployed as internal services boxes (tacacs and mrtg i suspect)...says something for the quality..
 
rudeboymcc said:
well I won't actually be usign RAID. I have though about it and did end up buying two same model 250g hard disks but in the end I figured it's not important data so i'd rather have the space.

apart form raid and costs is that it?

somethign i was thinking of was spyware and viruses with windows but if i'm not browsig the internet and msn isn;'t installed then there shouldn't be a problem right? is there any way to actually disable internet access to that computer? it will be running through a netgear router.
Click to expand...

Even if you are not using RAID, LVM is really nice to have. All your drives will appear as one large logical drive. YOu can expand the logical volume at any time by adding more drives.
 
Technically, having your data on LVM (striped and mapped PV's, not mirror PV's) doesn't increase the probability of failure - just the probability of loss of data ;)
 
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