I'd like to thank you all for your extremely valuable assistance in helping us with our new server purchase. We ordered the Dell that I originally asked about, with a few minor changes.
The discussion, however, did open me up to looking very seriously at Opteron systems -- something that I had never really considered. They do certainly appear to have strong advantages over an Intel Xeon system. Unfortunately, no matter how hard I tried, I could not come up with a comparable Opteron system for the price of the Dell... certainly not with support. And I'm not going to be here forever (I hope), so I do have to consider the legacy I leave others with. Not to mention, I travel from time to time, so if the system has problems when I am away, they're going to need to call someone for help... and not me! Jim McQuillan, you made a very valid point that I did not get a chance to address -- why raid? You are right. People these days do tend to just take that for granted. I've taken flak for not having a raid on our current main server through the years. I back up all our data to another machine every night, and to tape every week. Even with that, though, when the scsi drive went out earlier this year, we lost a couple of days worth of data, and were fortunate to have only lost that. I'm still living with the consequences of that, as at the time, I was backing it up to a Windows box -- so all the timestamps are all the same for all data files. What a pain in the neck! Now we have it going to a Linux server, where I can control that better. I didn't watch the logs close enough, so I got myself into trouble. Had I seen what was happening, yes, I could have taken steps to avoid this disaster, of sorts. I had a separate server set up to use in the event of an emergency like this. I could have copied all the files over to it, and had it up and running in two or three hours. But what happens if I'm gone and a drive goes out? Hopefully the raid will take care of that. But you are absolutely right, in that not all servers need raid. And if you have good backups and enough technically competant people that can handle problems when they arise, have at it... Why bother with a raid? All in all, though, it has been a very good learning experience. I've learned more than I ever cared to learn in this process, and I have lost that nice feeling I had when I was "happy" with the Dell that we spec'd out (ignorance truly is bliss, in some cases), but none-the-less, I am truly thankful for all the help. Maybe next time we'll find some way to swing an Opteron system. Of course, there is also the factor of "No one ever got fired for buying a ___." I don't like doing business that way, but I'll get a lot less flak if something goes wrong with the Dell, than had I built it myself, or bought one from some lesser known company.... Anyway, I need to get to work. I have to figure out why our backup server stopped running. The power supply went out a couple of weeks ago. I moved it to a whole different case. It ran fine for four days. Now I don't know what is going on with it. But it won't run even overnight now. And our phone system insists on having at least one phone down at all times.... I need a vacation! Or some technically competant help.... Anyway -- thank you again for all of your help and advice. With kind regards, Peter, hieromonk ---- Dormition Skete Our Monastery Website: http://www.DormitionSkete.org Our Catechetical Website: http://www.TrueOrthodoxy.Info ---- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
