Anthere wrote:
An employee at HP in France has contacted us, offering us free hardware.
This is a no-strings-attached donation from a few friends at HP who want to support Wikipedia. They reserve the right to mention this donation.
The machines offered are:* One 4U 6 CPU Xeon 750 with 1GB of RAM* One 4 CPU Xeon 700 with 2GB of RAM* One 6U 8 CPU Xeon 900 with 16GB of RAM and 2 SCSI drive max (which might work as a web server box immediately)* 3 Celeron 600 1U with 20G/ide and 128M of memory.
There were a lot of discussion on irc these days about these servers and many people got involved to determine what would be best doing.
The three bigger servers will be shipped from Paris to Florida. We are currently trying to find cheap shipping cost. Any help/suggestion for *cheap* shipping is most welcome. We'd prefer a company with good credentials, but there is no requirement in terms of shipping speed, so we might be able to find a good price. Please, help us if you know a good shipping solution.
I will set a page on the future wikimediafoundation website (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF/Main Page) to begin listing corporations helping Wikimedia projects.
Before things are shipped across the ocean, has there been any consideration of the effects arising from having machines designed to work off the European power grid put into the North American power grid. The supply voltage issue can probably be overcome with transformers, but a differnce in the cycling of alternating current rates (60 cycles per second in North America) could make them useless. Will they even work with the same monitors as are otherwise used in North America?
Ec