We are planning on building a new file server running Linux and would appreciate your thoughts/comments on this configuration. The main function of this server is file serving and email server for 6 users. In the future perhaps hosting our web page with Apache. OS will likely be Mandrake 9.2 or 10.

Cooler Master wave master aluminum case
Athlon 64 3000+ (64 bit)
Aopen AK86-L MB with onboard SATA, Raid 0/1 support, gigabit LAN, FSB 800 mhz, 3 dimms max 3 gigs
Gigabyte nvidia Geforce FX 5200 video card with 128mb ddr
1 gig PC3200 Corsair ram
2 x 80 gig Maxtor SATA drives #6Y080M0(in Raid 1 configuration)
Lite-On combo drive 52x32x52x16

Some questions for you guys are:

-taking the future into consideration should I stick with an AMD 64 type chip or should I rather stay with the fastest regular Athlon out there

-Should I consider a Pentium 4 or Xeon instead of the Athlon

-Should I consider a dual processor setup with either Athlon or Pentium chips

-Thinking of running this machine with Mandrake 10. Should I get the server version or can I just do with the ver 10 for 64bit. Any suggestions of other OS's I should consideration.

Your thoughts are very important to us as it will help me determine what will be the best course of action for our group.

Many thanks in advance!

It depends on how much time you'll use that server and the cost-effectiveness of a regular processor vrs a 64bit one. I'd say go with the 64bit version because of it's increased projection for software in the future and of course it's inherent superior capabilities.
The only pentium 4 out there that can be compared to the Athlon 64 FX51 is the Extreme version which was going for $800-900 a few days ago, so in my opinion it's a stupid buy. Also it's the last of it's line and it's 32bit. About a Xeon... hmmm you'd be better off checking some reviews at www.tomshardware.com and of course checking the cost-effectiveness of a Xeon vrs an Athlon 64. The Xeon I believe is a lot more expensive because of it's 2mb cache.
One good this to note about the Xeon is that you'll be able to find a pretty solid and stable motherboard for it, while for the Athlon the makers are still trying new things. Drivers also have this issue. On the other side the Athlon is 64bit while the Xeon is 32bit. In the future, software geared towards 64bit processors, should be abundant and will reap better results than 32bit versions. Again, it depend on how much time do you expect to have the server running.
It'd be nice to have 2 processors, but I think that money should be spent on the issues you're planning to use the most. File serving. That means, get the fastest hard drives with the most ammount of cache you can. If you could get scsi, I'd say 10k or 15k RPM and 8mb cache. The thing is that the disk access, being DMA isn't processor intensive and a small email server for 6 people won't put the processor to work intensively.
Again my advice would be to focus on the bottlenecks. Remember that a chain is as strong as it's weakest link.
As for the server version... I haven't really checked the real differences. If it's all about support, then it's pretty easy to decide. Anyway, wait for may until the official release is out and at least buy the powerpack 64.
Other OS's: as long as it's free or has a decent price (like mandrake or those distro's for example) you should think about it. I don't think that buying a license to windows server 2003 would be a good move. Linux has been used for servers for quite a long time and in my opinion, it's better (if you don't need .net support or something like that). You should check red hat because it's widely used for servers although I've never liked it.

It may go against conventional wisdom but IMHO, for a small LAN with few users, it's more cost effective to buy new hardware for worksations and use old hardware for servers. A 3000+ CPU would be much more useful for multimedia tasks than serving up files. Generally, most servers are I/O bound, not CPU bound. So the money is usually better spent on faster disks (SCSI), a faster network (gigabit maybe) and more RAM. There are exceptions of course but, even for computationally intensive tasks, old harware configured in a cluster or farm will *usually* outperform a whiz bang new 64-bit machine for a lot less money.

Folks, thank you for the excellent comments. You've raised some valid and interesting points to consider.

One thing though, at NO point did I nor will I consider running windows on this box. My office clients, except mine, run XP; I'm the smart one running linux. I lose so much time in the day hearing and trouble shooting, 'I don't know what happened, why is it doing this, etc...' My linux boxes are stable, secured, and backed by the best tech support in the industry; the community of linux users!

Thank you again for the comments and if you don't mind might ask you later on for further guidance.

Kind regards,

@Crito: it's true what you said about the cpu intensive applications and that a server can be a not so powerful cpu as long as it has it's bottlenecks (ram, i/o) accelerated.
@Walter: Sure, I'd like to hear some more questions

This thread seems to be getting more discussion in the hardware forum http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=167737 so I'll close this thread.

cheers

Jamie