Hello, I'm considering purchasing a server to run Debian in a collocation facility. In the past I've either leased collocated servers, or just used whatever hardware was handy, but I haven't always been happy with that approach. I'm sure others have done this, and was hoping to get their advice and experience on what hardware works best with Debian.
Obviously I need something that is well-supported by Debian. Ideally I would like something with hardware drive mirroring (RAID 1), with good suppot from within the OS (so I can run a commandline tool to manage the RAID and run a cronjob to tell me if anything has gone wrong. Hot-swap drives would be very handy, too, again as long as they work well under Linux and Debian. Also, I've seen that many newer servers offer some kind of "lights-out management", a special console available over the network which allows manipulating the server before it's booted, including choosing alternate boot media, picking which kernel to boot, and toggling the power. Has anybody worked with these? Do they work well with Debian, and with a Debian client? Are they worthwhile? Price is a factor of course, and cheaper is better as long as its reliable. Under $1k would be ideal, but that may not be possible with the features I'm looking for. Beyond that not much matters; any fairly modern server will be fast enough. Many of these features are built into motherboards, and it's hard to tell whether they will work under Linux from just the documentation. I'm hoping in particular for servers that people are already using and have good luck with, so the hardware is already known to work. Thanks for any thoughts! ----Scott. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org