Hardware Reqs?
 

I'm looking to start off by running a server for my self and some buddies. Only like 4 people. Would the following machine do the job?

Dual P3 1.0ghz
1gb RAM
80GB UltraWide SCSI

And what Flavor of Linux do most people use? All my Linux Boxes are RedHat machines. Does anyone recomend another flavor?

Thanx

It SHOULD do the trick.

Flavors don't matter if you can customize it a lot yourself. Redhat is nice for people who don't want to mess with the command line.

I prefer slackware myself, but that's just me. Others will tell you all sorts of things.

Here's the trick to making that linux box work for you. Disable any unused network processes besides maybe ssh (never know). Keep mysql running, and the world and minilogin servers.

Close down all unnecessary processes loading at bootup, like usb detection, etc. Just close any and every piece of useless code. Then it should run VERY nicely.

that should work fine as a_Guest03 has stated, however i think that fact that it will work as long as you are NOT using that box for anything else should be stated. That means you cant play on that box ether.

Thanx for the feedback.

This box would be dedicated to the QEemu server. No GUI. Linux shows its power through the command line.

I do some server admin professionaly so setting everything up is not gonna be a problem.

I was just wondering what Distros people where using, cause alot of the different projects have their own libs and what-not. So if one particular flavor was known to have less hoops to jump through it would be a good place to start.

Slackware is a good stable distribution, my only complaint is that its slow on updates. They'll go years between releases. I use Gentoo at home, and RH on my work servers. Gentoo is alot of fun, it's quickly become my favorite distribution. Most people get hooked to it once they try it. Theres another really cool distro out there thats very gentoo'ish with a spell theme, you cast programs out of a grimoire to download and build them to the local box.. Neat concept.

You're probably good with about any distro out there. I really like RedHats implementation, they've made several very cool tools and addons for linux that I like. Debian is good and solid, Slackware too, but I have to say that my experiences with Gentoo has blown them all away. For a hands on techie geek type that likes to have total control over how the system is put together, Gentoo is the coolest.. I would never use Gentoo in a mission critical situation, but for a home machine its pretty darn cool.

I don't think you need to worry about resources on the box. I use to run X/KDE , EQEMU world and 20 zones, mysql, and my webservers all off my dual 400 celery server and didnt have too much trouble. Its since been upgraded to a 2.4 Ghz Dell PowerEdge 600SC, but it ran everything great. I like having an X environment on my boxes (if I use them frequently). There are just too many cool X only tools and games out there.. How can you play XMame on your linux box if you don't install X afterall !

Hmmm Gentoo huh? I've never tried it. Debian is very cool. I love their package system. RH RPMs piss me off more than anything. I find I never use precompiled packages(at least if I can avoid it) performance is always better if you compile your own stuff.

I love all the cool window managers you can get for X. I have a Workstation for that kind of things though, servers are commandline only :)

Another question: Bandwith?

I know since SOE optimized their packet structure and compressed alot of it the bandwith per client went down. But what did it go down to? How much upstream per client is needed? I know you can play on a 56k easy so it must be under 5k/s.

Matt, while it IS possible to play everquest in linux, it's a HORRIBLE idea to host and play eqemu on the same linux box. It pains me to consider how inefficient that is.

Server Config
 

Greetings All.

When Krusher's server was running i had 5 machines running the "world".

1. MySQL server was a dual PIII/600MHZ with 512 MB ram w/raid 5 .

2. The world server was a dual PIII 1GHZ w/512MB ram and an ide drive. ( Nothing special )

3. Zone servers. This is where i placed my best and fastest hardware. I ran 3 zone servers ea with Dual P4 2.8GHZ procs with 2 GB ram and fast ide drives.


FYI - All the servers were running RH9.0 with just a base install plus the dev stuff.

I found that this setup allowed approx 40 to 60 players in a zone at a time with just a little lagg.

The biggest factor in server performance that i found was the connection it was on. With Krushers server i ran it in my NOC with 2 DS3 for the backbone. I partitioned off a 4.5MB vlan that was dedicated for the "world".

Anyway. just thought you would like to know what my setup was. Hope it helps.

Krusher

Always cool to hear what setups others used. I'm looking to have quite a smaller server. I only really plan on having like 6 people max on my server.