Building a Server for College Class Project

[omnipo7ent]

I have an assignment for my class to build a server pc. I havent been givin a sheet of exactly what we need to do but I decided to start asking questions now and researching exact products etc. I know you need the obvious parts of any regular pc, such as motherboard, processor, cd-rom, power supply etc, but other then that exactly what do I need,Must be 5 servers so does that mean 5 hard drives? and specific types [serial ATA or IDE] Do i need 5 cd-rom drives or can I just use 1. Intel or amd? How would I connect all 5 hd's? through Sata connections on motherboard or through RAID? and if possible both? anything else that im missing? I already have a case, only thing is that I have only 3 - 3.5 bays for 3 hard drives, that means I would have to purchace 2 Hard drive Drawers for 2 out of the 3 - 5.25 bays I have. Any more suggestions or info that I need to be aware of?
Note: I already have 3 Hard Drives

2 - 20gb Western Digital - IDE
1 - 30gb Western Digital - IDE

Is there any way I can use these that I have and purchase 2 more IDE's or Serial ATA's Because Hard Drives are expensive, especially a 20 gb Seagate which goes for about 50+ dollars.

 

[hercules_upw]

My advice is lay off the bong and pay attention.

I mean come on! Didn't you learn how to build a server before they asked you to actually build one?

Sorry, I think a server can ba almost any computer, it just needs the software to be set up. A good server will have a lot of ram and be reliable. Thats about all i know about them.

Good luck!

 

[omnipo7ent]

haha its only 3rd day in class and hes just like for project you will need to build your own personal server. So i figured Id come on here and find out exactly how to operate and set it up, Its only 3rd day remember and we are learning what a NIC card like no one knows what that is lol. But im just posting to see what I can work with what I have you know and what I need to purchase etc.

 

[Chankama]

hmmmmmmmm?? Your Prof. asked you to make FIVE servers??.. Please clarify. That doesn't make any sense.

You should also check out ECC (Error correction coding) type RAM for any servers.

 

[omnipo7ent]

5 Hard Drives to host 5 things seperatly.

 

[chog]

I dont think you need 5 hard drives to host 5 things.....

 

[omnipo7ent]

oh ok so that means i can just use 2 of those IDE hard drives of mine, combine them to make 40 and just use that, with a new mobo, all that stuff?

 

[Chankama]

What do you mean by "host 5 things"? What are these "things"?.. You can just use one computer man .. Host as many things as you want .. You can make them listen in on different ports or whatever.

 

[Nitestick]

like Chankama said before look at ECC memory. AMD offers the Opteron for servers and Intel the Xeon (i think, haven't really checked for a while)

 

[TheMajor]

Just use an old computer. All you need is a connection to your LAN/Internet to be able to host somthing.
5 servers:
Telnet server
Apache webserver
FTP server
WWW File share server
Mailserver