One of the most interesting jobs around is to deal with networking equipment. We all work with networking when surfing the net. But we have to remember that behind every site on the Internet there is a man or a team. They try to make it faster for visitors, easier to surf and more responsive to user requests. Although there are a lot of commercial sites on Internet, most of the sites are free to use and most of them do not bring money to owners. With the online advertising industry fall, a lot of websites disappeared. I will not talk about software facts in this article, but about the hardware behind the web server. There are a lot of companies which live on Internet because they provide services for sites, to be more precise space, services and bandwidth. I don't want to enter the details of such businesses, but I want to explain you more about the differences between a regular computer and a web server. I will try to answer to several questions in the most practical way: building a server for web usage.

Job requirements

Before I start let me detail the job tasks. Please remember that the web server is a regular computer, built with a lot of common parts. By the way, the requirements below can be applied to all kinds of servers. The server built into this article is targeted to workgroup usage, departmental servers are different.
A server is different from a desktop computer from various reasons:

1. A web server doesn't need to be very powerful from the computing point of view. It should be based on compatible and reliable components. Many big companies rely on clusters rather than on very powerful servers.
2. A server must be redundant and able to handle common errors. The storage system should be redundant; the use of RAID is required.
3. Although we do not require a high computing power from a server it's quite obvious that a server is used for the amount of information it stores. It's best to fill the server with a lot of RAM memory so it won't ever need to swap. Swap is a killing process which can slow down a server in minutes. Pay attention that the amount of RAM needed by a particular server could be tricky to determine. The harddisk storage requirements are relatively easy to find, but in most cases it's quite hard to determine how much memory the server will need. Most administrators use to monitor memory usage and add more when the daily usage reaches a predefined limit.
4. Web servers in particular must be hosted in a Data Center. This means that the space is limited and has to be used as effectively as possible. The usage of durable rack enclosures is a must.

Following these requirements we will build a reliable, powerful, yet affordable web server, just ready to be hosted in a Data Center. We will use only common parts and we will test it using Microsoft Windows 2000 and Linux RedHat 7.2.

RackMount RM0162 rackmount chassis

When I first thought about this article I had in plan to build a Pentium III computer, after all Pentium III are the most popular processors in servers. After several days, following my colleagues advice I decided to try something new and use an AMD Athlon XP CPU, although most people do not recommend the use of AMD in servers. Let's start.