On Wed, 2003-09-03 at 11:13, Tom Munro Glass wrote: > Hardware support is certainly a major consideration. I've had reasonable > support from Dell in the past, but I've heard that if you play around with > the operating system, their support suddenly vanishes. This is why I'm > thinking about buying Dell packaged with RH9, although I'm much more familiar > with Gentoo.
I don't know about Dell, but other over-hyped PC assemblers (Gateway, Compaq) chock up their machines with non-standard hardware, to make it more difficult for you to move away from their platform. Get a generic box, with industry standard components. You'll be more able to swap out broken hardware if you do. Adaptec for SCSI controller, 3Com for network card, that sort of thing. Other manufacturers make good, well supported hardware too :-) > Good advice about the processor/disk speed Jim. I will definitely be using > SCSI and would like to use raid but it's too expensive. Software RAID isn't too bad a choice, it depends on why you want it. Also consider a journalled filesystem, there's nothing worse than an emergency reboot followed by a 60-minute fsck cycle on a server ... -jim
