[volunteers] Linux Compatible equipment available at bargain prices...

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Luke S Crawford (lsc at prgmr.com):

> your 2650 likely has 18gb drives.

P.S.:  Just to double-check and see if it's possible that my memory was
_that_ bad about what a Dell PowerEdge 2650 was, I checked the relevant
listings on eBay.  

_Standard_ drives on the PE2650 were a pair of 73GB U320s.  Larger and
smaller were available, but rare.

System typically came with 4GB ECC DDR PC266 -- theoretical max. 12 GB.
I don't remember which ServerWorks northbridge and southbridge
they used, but it was something with 2 x Broadcom (ugh!) NICs, integrated
ATI Rage XL video, hotplug PSUs, 2 x Xeon 2.58GHz.  LSI Logic / AMI
megaraid hardware-RAID chipset on the mainboard that Dell insisted on
calling "PERC3".

Outdated, of course, but not badly, and the point was that this is still
attractive for many uses for $99.


> You can get a much faster server that uses less power and has more ram
> for around $600.

Suppose I just want a Web server or something to play with, and I don't
_have_ $600 to throw away?  Maybe it's not for a colo; maybe it's just
for occasional use in an informal compute lab.  Or maybe the colo
doesn't charge a premium for power draw, and bills you for rackspace and
any excess over allocated bandwidth.  That would be pretty common.

It happens to apply with, say, SVLUG's own server hosting, to pick an
example.

Are we supposed to be dazzled by the revelation that there are faster,
cooler 1U machines in 2009 than a PowerEdge 2650 from 2004?  Don't look
now, but I think we all knew that.

Since we're showing off and second-guessing each other, though, I'll
point out that, for Web servers where *I* am paying for the power bill,
I actually prefer to stick to PIII boxes, as the power jump that
occurred with the P4 and Opteron rollout was pretty hideous.  And,
assuming you're not running Amazon.com (or  **cough** Ruby on Rails
**cough**) you're probably OK with motherboards that max out at decoding
2GB RAM, since you'll probably be network-bottlenecked, anyway.