On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 02:03:19PM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Jens Frank wrote:
1 CPU at 2.4GHZ P4. (They offer a cheaper Celeron, I'm not sure if the P4 is worth the extra money for webserving or not.)
The 2,6 GHz is 1$ cheaper. If you want to buy the same boxes for all purpose (squid+apache), I'd go for the faster CPU.
To be sure that I understand. For essentially the same price, you recommend a 2.6Ghz Celeron over a 2.4Ghz Pentium? That sounds fine to me, I just don't know how the differences between Celeron and Pentium affect performance for webserving.
No, I recommend the 2.6 Pentium, according to their web shop, the 2.6GHz version is cheaper than the 2.4GHz Pentium.
The SM-1151SATA has non-ECC memory. Being used to ECC and even hot spare memory, I'm not comfortable with this. 2*1GB is what I'd use, too.
Can you elaborate on this? All my recent server purchases have been from Penguin, and they are always ECC memory, which costs more and performs less, but which is supposed to be more reliable. But is it really? How much more reliable? Or have I misunderstood the difference completely?
Without ECC, you can detect a memory fault. Kernel panic.
With ECC, you get a message to the log file and can call Penguin to send a new module before it's completely broken.
My new G5 uses non-ECC ram, and it seems to work just fine. I have had plenty of bad sticks of ECC ram in my life.
Except for "dead on arrival" I've never had a failure of an entire ECC stick. But might be that the price difference makes a little quality difference, too.
Would you consider the use of non-ECC ram to be a "deal killer" on the SM-1151SATA, or just something that's not quite ideal?
The later. ECC is just like redundant power supply.
Remote management cards are really useful coping with crashed servers. It starts with being able to read the kernel panic message, being able to power off and on the server, and advanced ones being even able to insert a "virtual floppy" during booting (Remember the crash we had while trying to remotely update the kernel?). http://www.techland.co.uk/index/eric is a vendor-independent RMB. Compaq's ILO-boards are much more powerfull, though.
*nod* I'll look into these.
How does a remote management card compare to serial console redirection?
It provides a way to hit reset and power off/power on. But having remote helping hands, we perhaps won't need this.
I couldn't find a price for that Eric card, what do remote server management cards cost, generally?
Compaq charges some 600 US$
Keep in mind that we are going to have easy hands-on access to the servers, and we're going to be in a facility that's staffer 24x7 with free "remote hands" service for things like pushing a reset button and typing a few things on the console, sticking in a floppy, etc.
Yup. Didn't know this when proposing the remote cards.
Thinking of Squid, I'd rather spend the money for 2 Gigs of additional memory than for the faster disks. Memory should dramatically reduce I/O load on proxies. 2 additional GB are 762$.
And if this is non-ECC ram, then perhaps 2 additional GB are less than that from other vendors.
Those were the prices from SM's web configuration tool.
JeLuF