So an EQEMU server
will stress disk/memory access?
I've read that SoD (a pretty major EQEMU server) doesn't push their CPU at all.
Raid 0+1 would give me both speed and reliability, if I don't saturate the bus.
I thought a varation on SATA was the current top of the line system? <Research>SATA is 300 MB/s, best SCSI-640 is 640 MB/s, so SATA isn't the top top of the line</Research>. Yet HDD manufacturures don't seem to ship SCSI HDD anymore... (top-end disks at, say, western digital are all SATA varients)
How good of a hard drive does it take to saturate a SATA bus with a Raid 4 or 5 setup? Hmm. (that would get me 66% of my purchased HDD capacity instead of 50% from Raid 1).
I'm mainly doing this to play with the EQEmu code. I think I could have some fun refactoring it.
Decouple game-logic from communication-logic and projected-game-state-to-client-logic, then I can change the game-logic in interesting ways.
Ubuntu is just a default choice. Being somewhat inexperienced at admining a *nix system, I figured going with an easy to admin system might be optimal.
The last *nix system I had anything to do with admining ran off two 1.44 floppy disks (a software router running off discarded hardware back in '97 or so). I should be able to use XWindows (assuming Linux still uses it!) to admin the system from my laptop, so the pretty UI stuff won't go to complete waste.
Given
the EQEmu server issue, I should researve some of my server hardware budget for keeping EQEmu alive as well.
So while a high-end flashy solution is fun, being having a project to work on is also important!
Bandwidth being the main concern is interesting. That means I might want to make sure my server will fit in a rack, rather than make it look cool in the corner of my living room. If I later get serious, I can colocate it and get bandwidth cheaper than buying it for my home (maybe!).
Thank you very much for the answer to my questions!