I am starting a NS server, which will host about 16-20 players, Vanilla Classic, but I want to know wether it is better for me to run the server on Linux or Windows? And any other start up advise is greatly appreciated. What kind of Clock speed and Ram should I need, Like 500 mhz and 128mb or what?

As far as i can remember, ns server requirements are absolutely ridiculous. Something like at least 2GHz for a sixteen man ns_ server.

Someone correct me.

Gladly.

I'm currently running a 14 player NS server on an old bits-and-pieces box. I think it's got a 1.2GHz processor and 512 meg of ram. It runs an NS server, a Q3 server and apache webserver.

The limiting factor is usually bandwidth. You really need a minimum of one megabit upstream for a 16 player server.

--Scythe--

Well I have a high speed cable connection that it will be running on, it clocks in from 3.5 to 6 mbps (All the speed test I could find varied). Will that be enough to Host a server, mabie knock it to a 14 person or something? I will be getting the box even if I just have a small 12 person server, but I am hoping that I can get the 16 person up.

Your download speed and upload speeds are usually drasticially different. I, for example, have a 12 megabit down pipe but only 1 megabit up. It'd pay to send a file to someone over google talk, dcc, msn or whatever. If you get about 70-100kB/s send speed you should be OK.

--Scythe--

I've never had more than 384kbps up and have successfully run a 12 man NS server off this box, so I'm uncertain where those calculations come from.

Well, I have over 400kb/s on the worst tests I could find, so I am confident that My server may not be 10 ping but it will a fun place to play!

Edit:Added the kb/s fix.

-clings to his 2mb up connection- unhhhh to bad cox communications still sucks and loves to vary badly and jump from crap upload to super fast randomly and almost all the time.

I sometimes host a listenserver and I have about 1Mbps upstream. This equates to 120-50ms ping for most of my clients. It is true that the pings are much worse with turret spam on NS maps, I've never had a good technical explaination as to why it takes so much bandwidth. My computer system is very powerful (AMD X2 CPU, 2048 DDR2 PC2-4300, and slightly overclocked); my limitation is upsteam. It usually is. I'd pay to have more but I only have two ISP's in my city because Merto Govt. has laws banning other companies from laying competing lines. To make matters worse most of the city is having infrastucture overloads and they are too cheap and lazy to build new lines and nodes.