[Foundation-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] What should I buy?

[Erik Moeller]

Jimmy-
> 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

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