Sunday or Monday, I want to spend $10,000 on new hardware. What should it be?
1. 2 gigabit switches are ordered already, so don't say anything about that. :-)
2. Rackspace is now at a premium, HOWEVER, we should not worry a LOT about that, since we are going to have to get a 2nd Rack very soon no matter what we decide today. There is approximately 3U left in the rack, maybe 4U.
A 2nd rack is going to add $700 per month to our colocation bill, not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
3. I have here in the office 12 4U servers (11 mobos, 12 cases) of extremely questionable quality. Details are posted on meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hardware_donation_September_2004
4. Some have suggested more squids? Is there consensus on that?
On 19 Sep 2004, at 01:20, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
Sunday or Monday, I want to spend $10,000 on new hardware. What should it be?
- Rackspace is now at a premium, HOWEVER, we should not worry a LOT
about that, since we are going to have to get a 2nd Rack very soon no matter what we decide today. There is approximately 3U left in the rack, maybe 4U.
A 2nd rack is going to add $700 per month to our colocation bill, not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
- I have here in the office 12 4U servers (11 mobos, 12 cases) of
extremely questionable quality. Details are posted on meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hardware_donation_September_2004
- Some have suggested more squids? Is there consensus on that?
DISCLAIMER: I am an IRRATIONAL and biased religious fanatic about these things.
That said... ...since you're asking... Yellow Dog Linux Xserve's of course!
http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/apple/xserves.shtml http://www.apple.com/xserve/ http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/
Best bang for your buck! They're Apple Servers (with full hardware warranty) from an official Value Added Reseller, they're running a very decent Linux distro, they're ready for 64bit computing (Y-HPC) -- and they're 1U! Given the above details, you could probably fit in THREE of these beauties.
-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com
On Sat, 2004-18-09 at 16:20 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
Sunday or Monday, I want to spend $10,000 on new hardware. What should it be?
Has anyone ever approached any of the name brand hardware providers for donations, or at least deals? If rack space is a problem - while it may be OK now, there is no reason to spend money there if you don't have to - something like IBMs blade system may be worth looking at. Downloading their (overly complex) spreadsheet, a chassis lists at $2789(us), which is a lot for a box. OTOH, it isn't just a box, it includes integrated network stuff, dual GigE per blade. I don't know what a 28 port GigE switch is worth, but that definitely makes that price seem far more reasonable. The "smallest" blade, Xeon 2.4GHz, 1 GB ram lists at $2629. I have no idea how flexible IBM is for people off the street, but I think Wikipedia qualifies as a special case.
Speculating, I wouldn't be surprised if you could get 4 blades for $10k, and have them throw in a blade center for free.
Even if you cant get, or dont want, corporate sponsorship, I think spending $10k warrants more then a day of pondering. Ive never been involved with any organization large enough to even dream about hardware on this scale, so this might be completely insane, but that kind of gear is good for something, wikipedia may be on that list.
Jimmy-
- I have here in the office 12 4U servers (11 mobos, 12 cases) of
extremely questionable quality. Details are posted on meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hardware_donation_September_2004
Can these machines be refurbished to turn them into Wikireader terminals? Do we have any plans to do so? It seems to me that in the mid to long term, we will want to set up a hardware donation and refurbishing programme for that purpose, but the logistics of that could be quite intimidating.
Rather than set up a central, dedicated storage and testing facility, we could try a decentralized approach and let trusted volunteers store and refurbish as many machines as they can. We only would provide money for shipping the machines to their eventual destination. (We'd have a catalog of destinations and each volunteer would be assigned a destination close to them to save costs.)
We'd need an easy to install Linux Terminal Software (based on Knoppix?) at least. And we would need a setup in place where we can easily ship updates to clients, preferably without affecting other data on the client machines.
So - what are our plans in this regard? Is there a page on Meta for this already?
(Copied to foundation-l.)
Regards,
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
Can these machines be refurbished to turn them into Wikireader terminals?
It is theoretically possible, yes. The cases themselves are quite nice. If the computers can be used for something extremely lightweight like that, this would be perfectly fine.
Do we have any plans to do so?
We have no current plans. These machines are simply sitting in my office waiting for a plan.
I should add that I'm extremely busy and my own judgment of how I ought to most wisely spend my time would suggest that me working very much on creating 12 crappy computers to donate to a charity would not be effective; I can do a lot more good working on big picture stuff.
There are a few but not many local wikipedians who might take an interest. (To understand how few, though, note that we tried to have a local meetup of the type that I always have in Europe, and only 1 person beside me signed up to attend.)
At least some of these machines could fairly easily be turned into real servers for us, with a motherboard upgrade and so on. But even that will be a drain on my time (or someone's time), and so the cost savings would have to be fairly substantial for it to make sense for us to do that.
--Jimbo
On Sun, 19 Sep 2004, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
We have no current plans. These machines are simply sitting in my office waiting for a plan.
I should add that I'm extremely busy and my own judgment of how I ought to most wisely spend my time would suggest that me working very much on creating 12 crappy computers to donate to a charity would not be effective; I can do a lot more good working on big picture stuff.
Beyond a certain point, old hardware becomes a problem for an organization. I suggest you just donate them on to charity (or a school perhaps) immediately.
You could probably easily buy the equivalent hardware new for the work you could do im the time you've already spent posting this on meta and discussing it here.
Let it go.
On Sat, 18 Sep 2004, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
- Rackspace is now at a premium, HOWEVER, we should not worry a LOT
about that, since we are going to have to get a 2nd Rack very soon no matter what we decide today. There is approximately 3U left in the rack, maybe 4U.
Maybe now would be a good time to visit the idea of blade servers? Sun, HP/Compaq, and IBM all have decent blade centers now. (And there are "clones" out there as well.) [Ok, so Sun isn't listing the Opteron blades yet.]
Has anyone bought a serial console switch yet? (as has been discussed before.)
--Ricky
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org