Our mail server just recently kicked the bucket, as did a few other bits of crucial infrastructure vital to our business, because of broken power supplies and video card fans. It's beginning to become frustrating. We haven't got the budget to purchase something like a Proliant with a quarter of a million price tag, but am wondering what other alternatives might be present for off the shelf DIY hardware built to provide reasonably high reliability.
First off, any video card that has to have its own onboard fan is out of the question for such an application. We have already had three such cards destroyed in recent days from excessively high uptime. Apparently nobody sells non-AGP or even fanless video cards anymore (no suggestions about surplus shops here; getting them is hit and miss in such places). Onboard video chipsets may be viable (but some of these have their own fans too!), but they can't do anything for the otherwise viable motherboards we already have. I've already considered running them without video cards on deployment, but if the system crashes for some other reason, I'd like to have an escape valve that allows me to see what might have gone wrong. Are there still commonly available fanless video cards of any kind? The other thing is power supplies. About half of the long running servers we have had their uptimes cut short because of power supply failure. Any recommendations on where we could buy good, reliable power supplies? -- We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We've also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology... http://stormwyrm.blogspot.com/ -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
