Dell PowerEdge 2970 - questions/concerns

[TnB]

The office next to me was rolling over their equipment and i picked up this guy. It's overkill, but, as a learning experience I'm setting it up in my home as a NAS. I was pleasantly surprised to see this: http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/...re/200804-265/. Does this mean a x64 installation isn't compatible or it's just not recommended? I also want to bond the two gigabit ports but I feel like that is just ridiculously fast and will just bottleneck elsewhere. I'm going to roll with Raid 5 with 6 hard drives. The ubuntu community/documentation is great and I'll figure it out as I go. I'm just reaching out if I'm going to hit any unforeseeable roadblocks.

edit: should this be in the servers forum?

[mörgæs]

edit: should this be in the servers forum?

Let's move it and see if you get more response.

[tgalati4]

You'll be pleasantly surprised at the noise. I made a rack enclosure for my 2 poweredge servers in the garage. You're right, with gigabit cards, and twisted-copper DSL service, your bottleneck will not be the server. RAID might be overkill, you might be better served with JBOD (just a bunch of disks) and mirror your disks once or twice a year as needed. That way you can recover to a known, working configuration (except for changing disk UUID references as needed) in case of boot drive failure. RAID should not be relied on as a form of backup.

You might want to put a hypervisor on it so you can run multiple guest operating systems. I would suggest http://xen.org, but there are several to choose from.

[TnB]

I am using: Ubuntu 10.04.4 32-bit

Everything is running smoothly so far. Just wanted to make sure I could get it to work properly on a supported version before going newer and switching to x64.

Also, I'm doing a hardware raid5 for the "because i can factor." I know it's over kill, but at my level (helpdesk/jrIT), typical interview questions are: "whats your home set up look like?"