Hey all, I am curently on a drift team and we are in real need for a perma server! So I plan to take that responsibilitly upon myself. Since ill need another computer to run the perma server, what do you all recomend for a PC? I want a cheap computer, but i dont want to compromise to much on guest slots and risk the server crashing. Im looking to spend under 350$, and id perfer if it was a laptop since this thing will be rammed in my closet. Thanks for your help!

You can run it on almost anything you like. The resources requirements of a LFS dedicated server are tiny. You could happily run it on a 400MHz machine running Linux/*BSD/OpenSolaris (headless), or windows 2000.

The real issue is bandwidth. If you don't have much or it's unreliable, then I wouldn't recommend running a server from home. You can use the calculator in the non dedicated version of LFS (the normal version) to give you an idea of how much you need (Multiplayer > Start New Game, configure your parameters and you'll get an idea on the left). There are also providers, such as 500servers, who will make things much cheaper for you in the long run (especially if you only plan to host a LFS server, nothing more).

I also wouldn't recommend using a laptop as a server - they just aren't really suitable or designed for continuous running, especially in confined spaces.

If you want to build a small box just for LFS, then I can happily recommend almost any of the VIA Epia mini-itx or smaller system on a board solutions. I've run a full server from one (an 800MHz box, with a single IDE hdd, 512 MB of RAM) in the recent past and it used practically no resources. With LFS, currently, the real hog is bandwidth.

Hope that helps.

+1

I ran a lfs dedi for a few weeks on a celeron 400MHz with 160mb memory and a 8GB hdd. The most basic system you could prolly find, yet lfs still ran like a dream (Windows XP!).

My 5 years old computer now acts as a server. It even does have 19" rack case (Well, so does my new computer, my audio-gadgets etc. I almost have rack-mounted coffee-maker).

O man, you are truely a big help, im for sure goin with the small tower and not the laptop. Thank you all very much!

You don't even need to buy a computer. Look around, some people might have just upgraded from a PIII and will get rid of the old computer for almost nothing.