Hardware support is certainly a major consideration. I've had reasonable support from Dell in the past, but I've heard that if you play around with the operating system, their support suddenly vanishes. This is why I'm thinking about buying Dell packaged with RH9, although I'm much more familiar with Gentoo.
Good advice about the processor/disk speed Jim. I will definitely be using SCSI and would like to use raid but it's too expensive. Tom Munro Glass On Wed, 03 Sep 2003 10:41, Jim Cheetham wrote: > Having a good relationship with the hardware supplier is essential, as > there is a surprisingly high delayed-reject-rate in some common > components. I've seen SCSI controllers work fine for a week, then start > to crash ... SNIP > It all depends on how much love and attention the server is going to > get, and how stable an environment it lives in. I've run an old Intel > desktop PC, P90 and 256Mb RAM with SCSI disks, as a server successfully > over the last few years. If you don't ask it to do much, you don't need > much! Too many people go charging off to get the fastest CPU, never > realising that the server sits at 99% idle all day long ... Fast disks, > on the other hand, are always a good investment ... and they will make > up for a shortfall in RAM. > > -jim
