Rackmounting has an organizational, accessibility, and coolness factor, but it may not be what you're looking for. If you've got room for the rack itself (not cheap), then you use up the same amount of space with one system or ten (or however big your rack is). Other than that, rack cases tend not to be space efficient.
1U cases are the worst. In order to fit everything in, they have to be _really_ long and you end up with just an absurd aspect ratio. Also, the power supplies are expensive and everything about them is terribly loud. It's hard to get airflow through a case that thin and the high volume fans you need are loud and pricey. If you do go rackmount (I did), be prepared to shell out some cash. My favorite vendor for cases is servercase.com. They sell intelligently engineered, robust, reasonable products (reinforcements in the right places, shock mounts for the hard drives...). You can get a good case for under $200 pretty easily. You might want to shop around on power supplies and fans, though, because noise level isn't a high priority when building equipment for server rooms. If anyone's interested, I have a spare 4U ATX rackmount case I'm thinking of getting rid of. It's model CK439 from servercase: http://servercase.com/cgi-bin/miva.cgi?/Merchant2/merchant.mv+Screen=PROD&Store_Code=SC&Product_Code=CK439&Category_Code=4UE I've got plenty of spare fans and such to go with it. It's just too big for my purposes and I wanted to use 92mm fans instead of the big 120mm front fan this case uses. Don't skimp on the rack. If you buy one that's hard to move around, you'll regret it. If you get a big rack, make sure its on castors. Handles are a plus. If you're thinking of using a music-type road-case, be careful. Most are too short to hold most computer cases. You can find 4U cases that will fit; just make sure the case isn't deeper than 17 3/4 inches (server case has one) and that you have a full-depth road-case rack. -- Eric Irrgang - UT ITS Unix Consulting - (512)475-9342 _______________________________________________ Siglinux mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.utacm.org/mailman/listinfo/siglinux
