The Butt Ugly Weblog

LazyWeb server setup request

I just know there are people out there reading this blog who can give me just the perfect answer to this... so here goes.

I have two used dual-Xeon w/ hyperthreading Dell servers (loaned kindly by BaseN, thank you very much) which I'm planning to setup to replace an aging P4 shuttle, serving, among other things, this web site. I also have my private emails running on that server, as well as a bunch of personal home directories.

The question is, what is the optimal setup? The parameters which limit the setup are like this:

• The web sites run Apache 2, which both serves static pages, some PHP/CGI-BIN stuff as well as a couple of instances of Tomcat
• I am currently running two separate instances of Tomcat, so that when one is restarted due to e.g. JSPWiki upgrades, the startup does not adversely affect the other instance. Tomcat itself is fast; older versions of JSPWiki slow down when repositories are large. These are the worst offenders when it comes to memory consumption/load.
• Private emails need to be on a relatively fast machine so IMAP access is not annoyingly slow. Also, spamassassin is the second worst CPU consumer currently (yes, I run spamd to even the load a bit).
• I don't want to be installing/maintaining all the software across different computers, so I would prefer something like NFS to share common binaries & other stuff
• The system must be optimized for easy maintenance (I use Ubuntu, and I have no intention of switching because I don't want to learn a new distro right now) and reliability. That is, as much redundancy in the system as possible - remember that these are used machines, so we could lose a CPU, a fan or a disk at any time, so we should be able to switch to a single-machine setup with as little downtime as possible.
• Also running on these computers will be DNS, CVS (to be replaced with SVN in the future), mailing lists, and other small things.

There's plenty of network (Gigabit ethernet connections all around), and the machines are identical (2GB memory, 130 GB disk, 2x HT Xeon @2.6 GHz).

Any advice, hints or tips how this should be set up? I have considered virtual servers, but there are a bunch of reasons why they are not a good option just now.