Thinking of having some fun

[EmanonCow]

I'm thinking of dropping some cash and buying some hardware to set up a server to dink around with the source code of EQEmu.

I'm relatively sure that you don't need much in the way of CPU to run a server.

How much hard drive space to run a server?

How memory heavy is an EQEmu server?

How bandwidth heavy is an EQEmu server (per client)?

Should I go Windows or Linux? I'm biased towards Linux, because I already have a Windows box (laptop).

Technical background:
I'm reasonably computer savvy, but I haven't admin'd a non-toy Linux system before.

I do know my way around a unix command prompt, and I can program in C++/C/perl/python/batch/tcsh/bash/etc.

I am competent enough around hardware to put a computer together from OEM parts, but my response to a non-functional component is "toss it".

I did some small amounts of programming in InfomixSQL a long time ago, but never any admin of an SQL system. So with a touch of refresher, I could find every X in the database using selects and joins, but I have never installed an SQL database.

Other considerations:
I might use the box as a file server in addition to being an EMU server. My current system is a laptop, and data storage on a laptop is crampt and expensive...

Any advice on the specs of a system to buy? Any advice on if I should go Ubuntu or Windows XP/Vista?

(I put this in the Windows forum, because there is no forum for "general support questions about both Windows and Linux, and the Windows forum has a more recent post. )

[techguy84]

Good Server setups could go off the following basis,

Dual Core CPU at 2.0Ghz+
1GB minimum, 2-4GB recommend Ram
HD doesnt need to be major, but fast. SATA 3.0 or a nice SCSI, both in raid 1 arrays for security in redundancy

The biggest thing is Internet Connection. Broadband services are good for low to medium players, but for the advance 50+ server, things with high UL rates are good like T1 or above.

If you are in a location that has Verizon FIOS, that is a affordable to the normal server OP, as T1s and above have to be piped to your location with can easily get you into the 5 digits, with very high monthly fees. FIOS has UL faster than T1 for 90% of the time. Like 50mbit down, 25mbit up froim what I have seen from some torrent users, and its about the same price as cable internet.

Furthermore, its easy to have a nice server setup, but what makes or breaks your server is the content. What can you offer your players that they can not find or bulid themselves. Custom Content reigns supreme around here for the most part.

OS doesnt matter to much, Windows is easier to setup, but Linux is hands down the best for any dedicated server. If your going big, go Linux. You dont really need Ubuntu as that has alot of uneccasy GUI stuff for the common user. Your going to be running a server, so the abilty to utilize that nice graphics savvy {enguin game is not really needed.( or is that on openSUSE)

[EmanonCow]

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!

[uncommon]

Originally Posted by EmanonCow

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)

Do you mean SAS Drives maybe ? (Serial Attached SCSI)

These are sort of scsi drives with a sata interface (i think these are a bit faster than U320 scsi), 15k rpm and all, but like scsi : really expensive!

[EmanonCow]

Don't know -- I'm more than a bit behind the hardware curve.

Did searches on SATA and competing standards of hard drive connection, and I got SATA (2.6) @ 300 MB/second and SCSI-U640 @ 640 MB/second. Just standards, not products.

Sadly, getting the raw throughput stats on HDD doesn't seem to be something that manufacturers push out as easy to get. So I can't tell if SATA's 300 MB/second will be saturated by 3 Raid5 drives.

All of this is based off of the question: how heavy duty a system does EQEmu take? My initial suspicion would be that a very low-end system, by todays standards, with maybe an unusually large amount of ram would be more than enough to run a server, given that EQEmu servers have been around for multiple iterations of moore's law: but I just don't know.

And the bandwidth seems important: how much bandwidth does each single player, playing actively, use?

[johnyp]

Well bandwidth for a single player is going to vary because of the factors of : Location and speed/connection. I run a minilogin server in my house and use the Media computer (2gb ram, 2.8ghz AMD dual core, and a 300gb hd, and 2 Nvidia SLI cards)..(its early cant remember everything).. I run through lan but that wont help u determine how the ping is like but, with 5 computers connected to the same computer (server) I get about 14-28ms ping, and the load is fine, I dont lag at all on any computer, and the zones load considerably fast... But I only allow 5 zones to boot, since I have only 5 computers connect.

Hope it helps , its not hard to set up hehe, and since u know alot more than I do, then you should be fine setting it up.