Thanks for all the responses everyone. :) I'm fairly familiar with Linux (been playing with it since it was on 7 floppy discs), so the requirement to sort out sysadmin problems don't phase me. I was hoping to use CentOS virtualisation with other VMs on the Dell. Unfortunately it turns out the Dell doesn't have the capacity for what I'd really like to do. The system currently only has 4 x 36GB SCSI drives, so I'd need to hunt down a SATA back-plane and more drives to get the capacity I'd really like.
I also didn't think CentOS would be such a pain for a rails install. I've used several iterations of RedHat, but I definitely prefer apt and yast to rpm. The app itself does have a very low user count. Typically less than 25 simultaneous users. Only 5 users have write privileges, and typically only 1 person would be updating data at any point in time. That's why I think ADSL might be "ok". But like I said, I would definitely need to test it. The real issue is the volume of data being processed to populate the system. The data comes from logs that are typically 70-80MB in size (with some being over 700MB). Too much to upload over my ADSL connection to the rails server, so I've written a log parser that uses AR to upload the data model-by-model. Even using caching while parsing each log, the process is slower than I think it should be. Posting to a server on my own LAN would be much quicker. But the data in the rails site is only a tiny fraction of what's in the logs. So far the largest table has less than 4000 rows in it with data going back to May last year. Even with that small amount of data, I will hit limits of what I can do "free" (10,000 rows) on Heroku. There is almost zero prospect of this becoming a "commercial" venture, so I want to keep costs at an absolute minimum. There also is another requirement to get some additional data from the logs using a 3rd party tool. But the only way they've allowed to get that data is to push it through ODBC to a database using their own database structure. :( The ODBC requirement is a PITA that I was also hoping to resolve by having a Windows VM installed on the Dell. I'm considering having that data in a separate database and hacking some models pull it into the rails site and present it graphically. But I'll have to look at more disc space first. It generates significantly more data than I have been. I'll still configure the Dell up to run this, but whether it ends up being the "prod" server or not is still up in the air. Call me crazy, but I still have fun hacking around with this stuff. :) Cheers, -- Craig Read @Catharz https://github.com/Catharz http://stackoverflow.com/users/158893/catharz -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby or Rails Oceania" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rails-oceania?hl=en.
