I'm about to consider building my next Linux box for my use at home. I'm sure I'm not ulike a lot of folks here at this site in that I have very demanding specs for a "home machine."
My current machine was underpowered the day I built it, but I didn't realize that at the time. After all, who is going to need more than 512Mb of memory for a home machine? But then I installed Apache, Tomcat, mod_perl, Postgres, MySQL and a bunch of other stuff. Since this machine is my incoming MX I installed SpamAssassin and portsentry and a bunch of other IDS packages.
Then I noticed my disk light stayed lit pretty much all the time and the system spent a lot of time swapping and paging. Gee.. I guess I need more memory this time around.
So... which motherboard? Well, the two Intel motherboards that I bought to build my son and daughter's machines didn't work out so well. They ran hot and my son's machine crapped out altogether. My ASUS motherboard seemed to work just find. Guess I'll stick with that. And more memory...
Who would have thunk 80Gb of disk wouldn't be enough... now my disk is 85% full all the time and damifyknowwhy. Oh.. and why do I only have one spindle. Maybe I should look at SATA this time and set up a RAID.
But wait, RAID5 is notorious for the "write penalty" you pay. Hmmm.. wonder how bad that really is? More testing.. yeah that's it.. more testing...
