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Procyon

ProcyonProcyon is my new server.

Hardware

The chassis is a beige-box ATX case. It is double-width, with the motherboard and expansion cards on one side, and the drive bays on the other. This allows lots of room for air movement, and indeed the case has room for many fans. There is space for a redundant-power supply setup, but currently I have only a single power supply installed.

The botherboard is from an old Seanix machine. It contains an Intel 865G chipset and has onboard video, sound, and 100Mbps ethernet. The board is outfitted with a Celeron 2.5GHz processor and 1GB of RAM.

The machine is currently running two 250GB IDE hard disks in RAID1 configuration. The board also has two SATA ports, so my current plan is to increase the storage space by adding a mirror of large SATA disks and migrating the data over.

Operating System

The system is currently running Debian Lenny. The kernel is a stock Debian package, which makes administration easier. Additional software (MythTV) is sourced from www.debian-multimedia.org.

Administration

Almost everything is administered through Webmin. I chose this route because it makes administration simpler and more consistent.

Services

Procyon provides the following services:

  • Firewall/NAT gateway
  • DNS/DHCP
  • Web Server
  • Mail Server
  • File/Print Server
  • MythTV backend

Since I'm not running a single Windows machine on my network anymore, I was able to drastically simplify my server configuration, ommitting things like Samba, LDAP, NFS, etc.