Hi guys,
First off, thank you all so very much for the support. Within just a few
short hours of Bruce emailing earlier today I've received a lot of
support in the form of donations and pledges. It means a lot to me
personally as well. And it's still trickling in. I'll give all of you
guys some time to get these emails in the various timezones. I'll get
back to you guys with a running total of how much has been donated to
the server fund.
Already there's enough to purchase a more than decent server right now
that will last us many years. The question that obviously comes up is
what kind of specs, brand, whatever.
I don't just want to go out and buy something, I'd like you all to be
involved and give me your recommendations and suggestions.
I'd like to concentrate on actual specs, not brandnames and prices so
much. Let's figure out what we really need (read: not what we'd like to
have. 4 GB of RAM and quadruple 200 GB SCSI may sound nice, but overkill).
For those who don't know, the current specs of the server:
P3-750 MHz, 512 MB RAM, dual 9GB SCSI hard drives.
Obviously no longer sufficient for what LFS needs today.
1 GB of RAM will be the absolute minimum but I'm looking toward 2 GB so
we don't bottleneck ourselves too soon. As for hard drives, we don't
truly need tremendous amounts of space. The current 18 GB is a bit tight
so we'll want more there. I was thinking dual 80 GB drives in a RAID 1
configuration for safety. 80 GB usable space is more than plenty for us.
SCSI vs. SATA. I'm a SCSI fan but I've had lots of good success with
SATA too. Plus sides being that we can get more space for much less money.
As far as CPUs go, we have some options. Pentium 4, Pentium D, and Intel
Xeons are my three choices at the moment (I'm still not an AMD fan but
I'll consider it too) as they offer nice amounts of speed for reasonable
prices. The question is if we really need dual CPUs or not. They are
nice and will help with some of the work we do, but are they needed. At
2.8 to 3.0 GHz, there's plenty of speed that dual CPU could be
considered money we don't really need to spend. I'd rather put it into
more RAM or larger hard drives.
Those are just some thoughts.
As far as the budget we have to work with, I can't provide an exact
amount yet because it keeps changing. Right now we're looking between
$1,000 and $1,500 USD. This includes the pesky "hidden" costs such as
taxes, shipping, handling, and other costs that come to look with a
server upgrade and replacement of this kind. The budget for the actual
server itself will be closer to $1,000 than $1,500 but like I said, this
changes depending on the amount of donations.
--
Gerard Beekmans
/* If Linux doesn't have the solution, you have the wrong problem */
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