See notes and questions, below...
>Pliny - Running MySQL, Apache 1.3.27 and kernel 2.4.20 and the
>non-English Wikis
>
>Tyan S2462 motherboard
>2 Gig RAM (4 512Meg modules of ECC Reg. 266 MHz PC2100 DDR RAM in 4
>slots)
>2 Processor AMD Athlon MP 1800+/266FSB
>Adaptec AIC-7899P SCSI U160 controller
>1 IBM 36 GB SCSI Ultra 160 / 10 K RPM
>1 IBM 36 GB SCSI Ultra 320 / 10 K RPM (running as U160, of course)
>Dual onboard 3Com 10/100 (3C982) adapters
To give this machine some oomph, I could buy 4 pieces of 1 Gb
PC2100 266 RAM for a total of 4 gig for this machine, at $123 each.
Then, we could also do a CPU upgrade, I assume any Athlon MP with a
266 FSB would do? The fastest one I see is Athlon MP 2800, $241.
This is a Socket A? (Please verify by looking up the motherboard
specs?)
So that's $482 for new processors, $492 for more ram. And presumably,
those 512Mb pieces could be used elsewhere someday? Total cost, then
is: $974
>Larousse - Running Apache 1.3.27 and kernel 2.4.20 and the English Wiki
>
>TYAN S2518UGN motherboard
>2Gig RAM (4 512Meg modules of ECC Reg. 133 MHz PC133 SDRAM in 4 slots)
>Pentium III 866MHz processor w/256K cache
>Adaptec AIC-7899 SCSI U160 controller
>1 Quantum Atlas 18 GB SCSI U160 Drive, currently unused and known to
> be troublesome (It's awaiting some tsting which I have put off due to
> the high load on the system)
>1 IBM 36 GB SCSI U160 Drive
>Dual onboard Intel 10/100 (eepro) adapters
This one is a bit trickier, so I suspect that a better route to go
with this one would be a motherboard upgrade. After all, a PIII/866
is very tired technology now.
I found a Tyan S2462NG (the same as in pliny?) with a single 2800
processor for $585. Throw in another 2800 the same as above, for
$241, and throw in the same 4 gig of DDR ram as above, $492.
So that's 585+492+241= $1318 to make this machine identical (or
anyhow, similar) to pliny.
So $1318+974 = $2292 total cost.
Since I priced all these things from different suppliers, I'd have to
study out the options for shipping costs, etc. But anyhow for $2500,
we'd have this stuff for Wikipedia. That'd be a huge improvement, I
think, while also leaving us with two nearly identical machines, and
thus well-poised for these two to be equal load-balancing frontend
webservers in the future, when we may buy a MEGA MONDO db machine.
I looked hard at AMD Opteron machines as an alternative. For around
$6,000, we could get a pretty decent Opteron machine. But this
tech. is so new that the options for motherboards and the like are not
very many. For example, it's sort of hard (not impossible!) to find
Opteron/SCSI machines -- many vendors are like Penguin Computing,
i.e. they are currently only offering a single Opteron alternative,
and it isn't SCSI.
So my thinking is that we beef up the processors and ram in what we
have now, and at the same time prepare for a new architecture in the
near future.
--Jimbo