OpenSuse 13.2 on Dell PowerEdge R415 1u Server

Dell supports the Enterprise versions of Red Hat and SUSE Linux, but we'll see how the open version does instead. I can't afford the expense of the enterprise versions, incredible how much they have skyrocketed over the years!

My websites are straining heavily under the load of the ~20 different community sites, email, DNS, etc. on my Asus RS-120-E3/PA2/P5MT-R dual core Intel Pentium  D CPU  2.8 Ghz, 8 GM Ram, and 1 pair mirrored 320 GB Sata drives, and all of the spam (96% of processing time is spent just blocking spammers and attackers, the remaining 4% left has to run the rest of the legitimate website and email traffic.

Hopefully the changes in the pipe will greatly improve things for a few years to come.

The Asus will become a backup DNS and Mail server.

The venerable VA Linux box will help with tertiary DNS and other services (2x P3 866 Mhz).

The custom built VA clone from Todd all those years ago as a quarternary service redundancy as well.

And the new PowerEdge R415 Chassis w/ 4 Hot-Plug HDs in RAID 10 arrary, LCD Diagnostics and 2x 6 core AMD Opteron 42XX Procs, with 16 GB Ram (upgradeable to much more down the road), and ~1 TB total storage available in the array (4 hotswaps).

Anyhoo, the installation consists of OpenSuse 13.2, network install, server config, and hardened installation. Hopefully this 4 server setup will significantly improve overall performance of the websites for everyone.

I will be posting any challenges with the OpenSuse 13.2 install on the Dell here.

I won't put too much detail (nervous enough with this much detail out there for the many attackers I have to deal with on constant basis, what IS it with Brazil???).

But any issues that could be helpful to others, I will post here in future updates to this article.