[wplug] eMachines?

[Ryan Brown]

I totally agree with you on doing raid 5 and having spare hot boxes. I am
just saying the warranty is good for someone in my situation where I can not
be in 5 different locations at once to fix things. I used to have servers in
Seattle, Houston, Los Angeles, San Jose, and Connecticut. I could not have
them all in 1 location as I needed specific ping times to different areas.
My west coast servers had a 160-180 ms ping to Belgium which was too high,
so adding some on the east coast brought that down to 90-100 ms. The same
applies to China and the east coast - which totally not unexpected but still
surprising, Chinese traffic has passed up US traffic on my network.



-----Original Message-----
From: Drew from Zhrodague [mailto:drew at zhrodague.net] 
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2004 9:37 AM
To: wplug at wplug.org
Subject: RE: [wplug] eMachines?

> What do you use for servers then if you have any? I used to always make my
> own servers but I found it was a waste of my time if a part went bad
within
> 3 years (atleast 1 hard drive would go bad for sure in that period). With
> Dell's 4 hour response, 24x7x365x3 they will be here within 4 hours at any
> time to change parts. Up until recently I used to colo all of my equipment
> in Los Angeles. This would sure be a pain in the ass to change drives, add
> memory, etc being in Pittsburgh. With the Dell support contract they would
> go to the data center and do the changes I needed. Yes Dell is expensive
> compared to home built boxes, but I find the support I receive definitely
> worth it. I have yet to find a rack case that compares to the quality,
ease
> of opening / swapping parts / and sleek design of a Dell 1750 / 2650
model.

	Interesting you bring this up. I've used a variety of different 
vendors boxes, and was never really satisfied. I used to think that 
specific hardware was required for each machine that I would have a 
specific requirement for. I used to also build my own servers, and still 
do for my own stuff, but not out of choice.

	I suggest Linux's kernel-raid, and mirrored or raid-5 disks. Your 
disks will die. Expect this to be the case, and you won't lose a single 
byte.

	Do a search on the Internet. 1U servers are pretty cheap these 
days. Compared with new machines, a few last-year's models are pretty good 
on space. They're cheap enough these days that you can have a spare or two 
ready to go if something went wrong.

	Having worked for several large hosting environments, and several 
high-profile website factions, I've seen alot of hardware, and I've seen 
alot of hardware just fail. The good facilities would have stuff ready to 
go, and have failure planned into the mix.

	It's great to have a warranty and everything, but what do you 
tell your customers when their requests are spilling out on the floor 
because your box is toast, and the vendor isn't there yet?

	I've been eyeing some of these outdated supermicros from xyz 
Internet vendors. Some of them are cheaper than cheap workstations, and 10 
of them will handle a lot of traffic.

		Just had my third cup of coffee, I'm ready to go!

--

Drew from Zhrodague		http://www.WiFiMaps.com
drew at zhrodague.net		Location Based WiFi

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