Re: upgrade fund
On Mon, Mar 26, 2001 at 11:41:50PM +0100, Robin Szemeti wrote: Usually when people talk about servers with 600 gigabytes of data its fair to assume that their will be a considerable load on them, clearly thats not the case here .. so I'm sure IDE will be just fine. 500Gb - RAID-5 means I have to 'waste' a drive. I know, half a terabyte seems a little silly for personal use, but I've probably got tenth of that already in divxs, aiffs (I'm a location sound recordist as well, and I archive *everything*), mp3s ... and that's excluding the archive of ISO9660 images that I've downloaded or created myself. Pity, I know of some very nice rack mount RAID solutions with fibrechannel architecture and up to a terrabyte in 3U ... sure you can;t be tempted ? ;) I can be *tempted* but I doubt the bank account would stand it. sigh if only it was someone elses money ... -- David Cantrell | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/ This is a signature. There are many like it but this one is mine. ** I read encrypted mail first, so encrypt if your message is important ** PGP signature
Re: upgrade fund
i'd like to do it via dabs.com, because their interface is useable and i've not personally had any problems with them. i'll pick only in-stock stuff because i understand that they can be slacker than they advertise when it comes to re-stocking. jo would hopefully oversee the process so i don't end up ordering bananas by mistake. I ordered a HD from dabs.com last Thursday, the interface said they had 76 in stock. After registering, paying and completing the order, suddenly all the stock had vanished. It's now Monday and they are still awaiting stock. This could be an isolated case I suppose...but I've bought one from a computer fair now and have cancelled the order. Yes - RAM is sooo cheap at the moment - get loads! /Robert
Re: upgrade fund
On Mon, 26 Mar 2001, you wrote: [buying a hard disk] Anyone know of any good sources of cheap, BIG hard disks atm? Like in the 70 to 100Gb range, IDE? Speed not an issue, reliability is as these are for my server. I need^Wwant six, and would rather not pay the 250-odd quid for reliability you want scsi .. ever wondered why scsi costs more? .. the drives are generally built to a better spec. when it comes to servers for speed you want scsi ...esp under linux .. (ISTR that the 2.4 kernel will have ultra-ata 66 support .. prior to that you just get basic IDE AFAIK) scsi multithreads, IDE doesn't.. this makes quite a difference on multi-process applications .. esp. servers when a scsi device goes down it often leaves the bus usable, when an IDE goes down it usually kills the other drive its master/slave to. Its not uncommon for the other port of the usually integrated IDE controller to hang at this point. If you are going to use multiple IDE try and hang them all as masters on as many controller cards as you can .. this can be a problem with PC architecture .. ( whose bright idea was it that 16 interrupts would be enough then ?) but if reliabilty really is important its the way to go. (after scsi, natch :) -- Robin Szemeti The box said "requires windows 95 or better" So I installed Linux!
Re: upgrade fund
On Mon, 26 Mar 2001, Robin Szemeti wrote: scsi multithreads, IDE doesn't.. this makes quite a difference on multi-process applications .. esp. servers I will vouch for this having just loaded a ~1Gb database on my laptop - it takes about 2-3 times longer on IDE here than it would on an otherwise similarly specified machine with SCSI disks - this is because IDE has a greater need to serialize the multiple reads and writes required for this operation /J\
Re: upgrade fund
On Mon, Mar 26, 2001 at 07:02:59PM +0100, Robin Szemeti wrote: On Mon, 26 Mar 2001, David Cantrell: Anyone know of any good sources of cheap, BIG hard disks atm? Like in the 70 to 100Gb range, IDE? Speed not an issue, reliability is as these are for my server. I need^Wwant six, and would rather not pay the 250-odd quid for reliability you want scsi .. ever wondered why scsi costs more? .. the drives are generally built to a better spec. No, the drives are frequently exactly the same mechanics with a different board. Anyway, by reliable I mean "not sold by some dodgy bloke in a computer fair who threw them down the stairs a few times" and. AFAICT SCSI costs more because you're paying for the 'brand'. when it comes to servers for speed you want scsi ...esp under linux .. It is my impression that SCSI only becomes worthwhile if you're expecting lots of reads and writes at the same time. (ISTR that the 2.4 kernel will have ultra-ata 66 support .. prior to that you just get basic IDE AFAIK) Naah, it's a personal server, which I should probably have pointed out. It has one user - me - and is used mainly for backups and for burning CDs. I believe you get ATA 33 in 2.2.something, but I don't particularly give a shit. scsi multithreads, IDE doesn't.. this makes quite a difference on multi-process applications .. esp. servers I don't need that. It matters not to me if it takes a few seconds extra to copy a file. And in any case, I'll be spreading the load over at least two - possibly three - IDE controllers which should mitigate this to a certain extent. -- David Cantrell | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/ This is a signature. There are many like it but this one is mine. ** I read encrypted mail first, so encrypt if your message is important ** PGP signature
Re: upgrade fund
On Mon, 26 Mar 2001, you wrote: No, the drives are frequently exactly the same mechanics with a different board. Anyway, by reliable I mean "not sold by some dodgy bloke in a computer fair who threw them down the stairs a few times" and. AFAICT SCSI costs more because you're paying for the 'brand'. Naah, it's a personal server, which I should probably have pointed out. It has one user - me - and is used mainly for backups and for burning CDs. right .. got it .. I thought you meant the 'must run for 10,000 hrs, hot swap PSU's and a generator outside' type reliability .. you jsut mean 'don;t fall over every week' sort of reliability .. Usually when people talk about servers with 600 gigabytes of data its fair to assume that their will be a considerable load on them, clearly thats not the case here .. so I'm sure IDE will be just fine. Pity, I know of some very nice rack mount RAID solutions with fibrechannel architecture and up to a terrabyte in 3U ... sure you can;t be tempted ? ;) -- Robin Szemeti The box said "requires windows 95 or better" So I installed Linux!
Re: upgrade fund
At 22:17 25/03/2001, you wrote: unless anyone has any arguments, i'll buy a fast, reliable largish hard drive and lots of memory (i understand it's cheap at the moment) for penderel (the computer) this week. i'd like to do it via dabs.com, because their interface is useable and i've not personally had any problems with them. i'll pick only in-stock stuff because i understand that they can be slacker than they advertise when it comes to re-stocking. jo would hopefully oversee the process so i don't end up ordering bananas by mistake. are the mungers happy with this approach? or would you prefer bananas? Sounds good to me. Can we have bananas too? Dave... [hungry] -- http://www.dave.org.uk SMS: [EMAIL PROTECTED] plugData Munging with Perl http://www.manning.com/cross//plug
Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund
alex wrote: I'd prefer to do it the other way round if you don't mind, and say you have just one month to send a cheque for 50 pounds made out to C A McLean [1] to state51, 8 rhoda street, bethnal green, e2 7ef , or brought along to the next social or technical meeting. Hm, random question -- is penderal just for London.pm members or might it conceivably be opened to a wider public? For example, what about honourary London.pm members such as dha? To come to the point, I might be interested in buying a share since I don't really have a decent machine anywhere else besides a shell account somewhere in California. And colocating a machine of my own seems a bit costly to me at the moment. However, I can imagine you might be wanting to keep penderel a London thingy, which is why I thought I'd ask. Cheers, Philip
Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund
* Paul Makepeace ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Building reliability is probably your best aim: does it have a UPS? does it have a RAID 1/0 config? Dual PSUs? Tape drive backup policy? Those things are way more important than a faster chip or RAM. your right of course, however all of those things are more expensive and in some cases involve disgarding existing equipment and at the end of the day its a hobby machine that currently is lucky to have an average CPU usage of 0.1% per hour -- Greg McCarroll http://www.mccarroll.uklinux.net
Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund
On Fri, Jan 19, 2001 at 11:42:52PM +, Greg McCarroll wrote: * Paul Makepeace ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Building reliability is probably your best aim: does it have a UPS? does it have a RAID 1/0 config? Dual PSUs? Tape drive backup policy? Those things are way more important than a faster chip or RAM. your right of course, however all of those things are more expensive and in some cases involve disgarding existing equipment and at the end of the day its a hobby machine that currently is lucky to have an average CPU usage of 0.1% per hour But when we start using it for the web site and the mailing list and that jobs thing I think jo is working on we're all gonna get really annoyed if it breaks... Michael
Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund
[1] My first name is actually Christopher, but handily my parents changed
[Oddly enough, same here. I'm Chris Paul ... It's an absolute pain in the
arse. Note to parents: don't do this.]
I know a Andrew Christopher Jackson that's known as Chris. So it's not
just Christopher that's shunned...
128MB RAM and a K6 is quite enough to run a decently hammered mod_perl site.
You only need more memory if you end up using a large database or doing
something rash like install Oracle. Assuming you're not on an OC-12 backbone
and you're not doing finite element analysis of an F15 jet per form
submission, your IO bottleneck will be the net.
I would think that more RAM is a good idea. This is because:
1. It's cheap right now
2. We're a varied range of people so will probably want to load a whole
host of modules in mod-perl. This will probably make our httpd
rather fat and take up a lot of memory - much more if it was a simple
production machine.
Building reliability is probably your best aim: does it have a UPS? does it
have a RAID 1/0 config? Dual PSUs? Tape drive backup policy? Those things
are way more important than a faster chip or RAM.
Along these lines I'd buy another hard drive. Having lots of hard drive
space is good for backups - most time data is lost not due to hardware
failure but the directory stucture it's in being trashed through
human/coding error. Simply back up to another area.
Also if we keep the original drive we can simply backup to that
nightly. Quicker and easier than tapes - and as we've said any long term
data should really be backed up by individual users anyway, so we need not
worry about things like state51 burning down (well, as far as the server
data is concerned)
For the record, my box, heavly used used by myself, Leon, Simon, Shevek,
and Magnus for 2shortplanks.com / astray.com / huckvale.net / anarres.org
is:
model name : AMD-K6(tm) 3D processor
stepping: 12
cpu MHz : 501.143806
total:used:free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 264376320 208822272 4048 47583232 25063424 128712704
Swap: 542826496 32563200 510263296
(Leon, thanks for the memory)
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda6821340164 816634860 3890812 100% /
/dev/hda115522 3540 11181 24% /boot
(actually, that's a lie - df very broke - it's only 18GB - but you get the
idea)
Later
Mark
(off to see the offspring)
--
print "\n",map{my$a="\n"if(length$_6);' 'x(36-length($_)/2)."$_\n$a"} (
Name = 'Mark Fowler',Title = 'Technology Developer' ,
Firm = 'Profero Ltd',Web = 'http://www.profero.com/' ,
Email = '[EMAIL PROTECTED]', Phone = '+44 (0) 20 7700 9960' )
Hardware Upgrade Fund
A quick reminder of something I mentioned last night. The hardware spec for penderel (our server) is starting to show its age (I don't know exactly what the specs are, but the box is at least 18 months old). There are also a number of people who have expressed an interest in joining the exclusive club of people who have accounts on the server. The suggestion is, therefore, that we set up a hardware upgrade fund to buy new bits for the server. Contributions would be set at £50 and anyone contributing would gain the same rights on the box as the origianl contributors. I'm therefore looking for a volunteer to organise this. The organiser would, of course, be given a free login on the server. Anyone fancy it? Dave...
Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund
Dave Cross wrote: I'm therefore looking for a volunteer to organise this. The organiser would, of course, be given a free login on the server. Anyone fancy it? I'll give it a go.
Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund
At Fri, 19 Jan 2001 12:12:58 +, Simon Wistow [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dave Cross wrote: I'm therefore looking for a volunteer to organise this. The organiser would, of course, be given a free login on the server. Anyone fancy it? I'll give it a go. Simon, The advantage of having Alex doing it, is that with penderel sitting under his desk, hardware installation is much easier. I'm sure he'd be happy for help speccing the requirement tho'. Did you get your login account? You earned one for lugging the bloody thing halfway across london. Dave...
Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund
On Fri, 19 Jan 2001, Dave Cross wrote: At Fri, 19 Jan 2001 12:10:26 + (GMT), alex [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, 19 Jan 2001, Dave Cross wrote: Anyone fancy it? I forgot to mention, I offered to do this before, and that offer still stands. Alex, Thanks for the offer. I'm more that happy to take you up on it. How soon do you think you can have a list of the kinds of hardware that you want to buy? That would give us an estimate of how many new donors we're looking for. ISTR that I *was* originally signed up to pay for the server in the first place but for some reason failed to do so I would be quite happy to chip in the odd 50.00 this time. If anyone needs some help organizing as well let me know. /J\ -- Jonathan Stowe | http://www.gellyfish.com | I'm with Grep on this one http://www.tackleway.co.uk |
Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund
Dave Cross ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: At Fri, 19 Jan 2001 12:12:58 +, Simon Wistow [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dave Cross wrote: I'm therefore looking for a volunteer to organise this. The organiser would, of course, be given a free login on the server. What's the current specs of the machine? (Just out of interest) John -- :wq
Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund
A quick reminder of something I mentioned last night. The hardware spec for penderel (our server) is starting to show its age (I don't know exactly what the specs are, but the box is at least 18 months old). There are also a number of people who have expressed an interest in joining the exclusive club of people who have accounts on the server. The suggestion is, therefore, that we set up a hardware upgrade fund to buy new bits for the server. Contributions would be set at 50 and anyone contributing would gain the same rights on the box as the origianl contributors. I'm therefore looking for a volunteer to organise this. The organiser would, of course, be given a free login on the server. Anyone fancy it? Dave... As a comparison, here's the spec of Ourshack.com (which houses Template Toolkit amongst other projects). I don't think anyone's complained about performance just yet. Pentium II 233MMX 320MB RAM (this we have upgraded) 14GB HD Box is running Apache, Roxen, MySQL and all the regular stuff (named, mail, mailman), never seems to be heavily loaded. So you might be quite surprised how little you need to add. The biggest expense may be some kind of backup device. Neil. -- Neil C. Ford [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.binky.ourshack.org
Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund
On Fri, 19 Jan 2001, Dave Cross wrote: Thanks for the offer. I'm more that happy to take you up on it. no problems. How soon do you think you can have a list of the kinds of hardware that you want to buy? That would give us an estimate of how many new donors we're looking for. I'd prefer to do it the other way round if you don't mind, and say you have just one month to send a cheque for 50 pounds made out to C A McLean [1] to state51, 8 rhoda street, bethnal green, e2 7ef , or brought along to the next social or technical meeting. At the end of the month I'll let you all know what money we have and we can then decide what to do with it. Alex [1] My first name is actually Christopher, but handily my parents changed their minds after registering my birth and decided to call me by my middle name. PS The guy with the tennants extra broke in to another part of the building and caused some damage to a couple of studios :( it seems that he couldn't find anything to steal, but still, not nice. -- Snack pastries are dramatic when shapes are combined
Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund
On Fri, 19 Jan 2001, Dave Cross wrote: I'm not sure. I don't think I've ever known this. I'm hoping that someone woh a) bought it or b) is sitting next to it will be able to leap in with this information. [alex@penderel alex]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD cpu family : 5 model : 8 model name : AMD-K6(tm) 3D processor stepping: 12 cpu MHz : 350.803 cache size : 64 KB fdiv_bug: no hlt_bug : no sep_bug : no f00f_bug: no coma_bug: no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 1 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mmx 3dnow bogomips: 699.60 [alex@penderel alex]$ cat /proc/meminfo total:used:free: shared: buffers: cached: Mem: 130895872 126423040 4472832 53395456 62877696 15953920 Swap: 271392768 6909952 264482816 MemTotal:127828 kB MemFree: 4368 kB MemShared:52144 kB Buffers: 61404 kB Cached: 15580 kB BigTotal: 0 kB BigFree: 0 kB SwapTotal: 265032 kB SwapFree:258284 kB [alex@penderel alex]$ cat /proc/scsi/scsi Attached devices: Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 06 Lun: 00 Vendor: IBM Model: DDRS-34560 Rev: S97B Type: Direct-AccessANSI SCSI revision: 02 [alex@penderel alex]$ df Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sda6 4119172899532 3010396 24% / /dev/sda1 7746 2951 4395 41% /boot I can open up the box on any requested fact-finding missions. :) alex -- Snack pastries are dramatic when shapes are combined
Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund
On Fri, 19 Jan 2001, Greg McCarroll wrote: ok i was a bit late ;) -- Snack pastries are dramatic when shapes are combined
Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund
On Fri, 19 Jan 2001, you wrote: [gem@penderel gem]$ cat /proc/meminfo total:used:free: shared: buffers: cached: Mem: 130895872 125063168 5832704 46772224 63795200 15314944 Swap: 271392768 6909952 264482816 MemTotal:127828 kB if its of any intereset I was offered 133mhz DIMMS of the 256Mb flavour for ~65 + vat the other day .. memory has plummetted now is a very good time to buy. -- Robin Szemeti The box said "requires windows 95 or better" So I installed Linux!
Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund
On Fri, 19 Jan 2001, Greg McCarroll wrote: * Dave Cross ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: At Fri, 19 Jan 2001 12:34:11 +, John [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [upgrading penderel] What's the current specs of the machine? (Just out of interest) I'm not sure. I don't think I've ever known this. I'm hoping that someone woh a) bought it or b) is sitting next to it will be able to leap in with this information. [gem@penderel gem]$ df -h FilesystemSize Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda6 3.9G 879M 2.8G 24% / /dev/sda1 7.6M 2.9M 4.2M 41% /boot OK that'll be another disk or two then - if there are going to be a number of accounts on the machine then I would suggest /home should be a separate disk. I would vote for separate /usr /usr/local and /var partitions too. /J\ -- Jonathan Stowe | http://www.gellyfish.com | I'm with Grep on this one http://www.tackleway.co.uk |
Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund
On Fri, Jan 19, 2001 at 02:41:57PM +, Jonathan Stowe wrote: [gem@penderel gem]$ df -h FilesystemSize Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda6 3.9G 879M 2.8G 24% / /dev/sda1 7.6M 2.9M 4.2M 41% /boot OK that'll be another disk or two then - if there are going to be a number of accounts on the machine then I would suggest /home should be a separate disk. I would vote for separate /usr /usr/local and /var partitions too. insert holy war here
RE: Hardware Upgrade Fund
Personally I'd be happier if we had mirrored disks in there. I'd go for a backup system before a mirror, myself.
Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund
On Fri, Jan 19, 2001 at 02:37:24PM -, Jonathan Peterson wrote: Personally I'd be happier if we had mirrored disks in there. I'd go for a backup system before a mirror, myself. That could be good, too... We definately need one of the two. (IMHO) Michael Well a tape drive would be easier and (for the most part) cheaper to install. For mirroring you're either going to need a raid controller or use software raid... how good is that under linux? Seeing as access to the box is not currently an issue, tape changing can be done . Neil. -- Neil C. Ford [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.binky.ourshack.org
Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund
- Original Message - From: "Michael Stevens" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 19 January 2001 14:41 Subject: Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund On Fri, Jan 19, 2001 at 02:37:24PM -, Jonathan Peterson wrote: Personally I'd be happier if we had mirrored disks in there. I'd go for a backup system before a mirror, myself. That could be good, too... We definately need one of the two. (IMHO) ghh definitely /ghh that's better :-) I think the backup system should be individual users writing cron jobs to tar/gzip/ftp their stuff to other machines, or emailing it to their hotmail accounts if they don't have other machines! Who is planning to store data on penderel that they won't have somewhere else anyway. I don't think we should ever rely on our data being there. I have a local copy of everything that I have on other servers. Perhaps I'm missing the point here... /Robert
RE: Hardware Upgrade Fund
Who is planning to store data on penderel that they won't have somewhere else anyway. I don't think we should ever rely on our data being there. I have a local copy of everything that I have on other servers. What about applications running on penderel that generate data? Even if what they generate is small, it's a royal PITA to be emailing it around the net in the name of backup. If you go for something like an 8 day retention period with weekly full and daily differential backup, your backup data set would at most be double your working data set (unless anyone has really funky plans for applications). So, we need only buy two more of whatever size disk we want in there, and backup to disk is a world more fun than backup to tape (unless we feel like spashing out for a tape jukebox). Or, just get the extra storage space and give everyone an allocation on it that's double their allocation on the primary storage, and let them write their own backup scripts. But unless we've already got quota's running (have we?) that's not so practical maybe. Jon 'yay! sysadmin!' Peterson
Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund
Who is planning to store data on penderel that they won't have somewhere else anyway. I don't think we should ever rely on our data being there. I have a local copy of everything that I have on other servers. So, we need only buy two more of whatever size disk we want in there, and backup to disk is a world more fun than backup to tape (unless we feel like spashing out for a tape jukebox). I like the idea of a backup disk and a procedure that automatically backs up to it; I guess what I'm unhappy about is giving someone else the responsibility for all our data and the job of managing tapes, that doesn't seem fair. From a security point of view (are we worried about hiding our data from each other), the backup disk should only be readable by root. Yes? Or should all the files retain the owners permissions so that we can restore our data anytime we fancy without needing the sysadmin to do it. I like this plan. /Robert
RE: Hardware Upgrade Fund
Title: RE: Hardware Upgrade Fund I don't know about anyone else, but I'm quite happy to provide some money, but I'd much prefer to do a direct bank cash transfer (through online banking) I don't know if you'd want to publicise your bank acvcount details on the list, but if this is all going ahead and you don't mind transfers then can you send me your bank details and I'll set up the transfer. if anyone else is interested in that then I'd suggest to keep the traffic off the list then email alex in person. -Original Message- From: alex [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 19 January 2001 12:42 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund On Fri, 19 Jan 2001, Dave Cross wrote: Thanks for the offer. I'm more that happy to take you up on it. no problems. How soon do you think you can have a list of the kinds of hardware that you want to buy? That would give us an estimate of how many new donors we're looking for. I'd prefer to do it the other way round if you don't mind, and say you have just one month to send a cheque for 50 pounds made out to C A McLean [1] to state51, 8 rhoda street, bethnal green, e2 7ef , or brought along to the next social or technical meeting. At the end of the month I'll let you all know what money we have and we can then decide what to do with it. Alex [1] My first name is actually Christopher, but handily my parents changed their minds after registering my birth and decided to call me by my middle name. PS The guy with the tennants extra broke in to another part of the building and caused some damage to a couple of studios :( it seems that he couldn't find anything to steal, but still, not nice. -- Snack pastries are dramatic when shapes are combined
Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund
On Fri, Jan 19, 2001 at 02:42:19PM +, Neil Ford wrote: On Fri, Jan 19, 2001 at 02:37:24PM -, Jonathan Peterson wrote: Personally I'd be happier if we had mirrored disks in there. I'd go for a backup system before a mirror, myself. That could be good, too... We definately need one of the two. (IMHO) Michael Well a tape drive would be easier and (for the most part) cheaper to install. For mirroring you're either going to need a raid controller or use software raid... how good is that under linux? It's very usable. At Oven, we used it for the main mail-and-stuff server, managing something like a hundred gig of disk in RAID-5 loveliness. Personally, I don't like tapes. They go wrong easily and someone has to remember to swap the media. I favour doing backups to another machine with rsync. This has the advantage that you can do far more frequent backups. Perhaps that's what we should spend the upgrade money on - a cheap-ass machine with a bg cheap IDE disk to handle backups *only*. -- David Cantrell | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/ Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced
Re: Hardware Upgrade Fund
From: "alex" [EMAIL PROTECTED] [1] My first name is actually Christopher, but handily my parents changed their minds after registering my birth and decided to call me by my middle name. [Oddly enough, same here. I'm Chris Paul ... It's an absolute pain in the arse. Note to parents: don't do this.] Without wanting to sound too real-world and pragmatic, why not upgrade the server when you actually *need* to, i.e. learn how to monitor performance and when it starts to suck, *then* buy new stuff. Otherwise you'll end up in the situation it is now: a load of kit that's not being used is depreciating rapidly. 128MB RAM and a K6 is quite enough to run a decently hammered mod_perl site. You only need more memory if you end up using a large database or doing something rash like install Oracle. Assuming you're not on an OC-12 backbone and you're not doing finite element analysis of an F15 jet per form submission, your IO bottleneck will be the net. Building reliability is probably your best aim: does it have a UPS? does it have a RAID 1/0 config? Dual PSUs? Tape drive backup policy? Those things are way more important than a faster chip or RAM. Paul
