No prob, I'm just covering all bases here.

Have not heard back from Uncle Failsafe. Will have to ping him. If he delays further than I dunno, another week or two, I will just proceed, but it really does sound like some good hardware he has, and he would swing us a good deal.

I wish I'd known sooner. I don't hit the Meta section often. I've hit the tip jar. I also have a new tower case and power supply if you need them. I've given up on building my own computer.

Thank you sir.

The power supplies for this kind of server are different than the basic desktop; most target servers will have two power supplies so if one bites the dust they other will take over. But y'know, I've never seen a rack server's power supply die. They are over-engineered to run permanently.

I'm getting a little worried that this project is going to run into my other project -- the one where I have to find a place to live, and then move. Maybe the first half (Cellar server) can be done before the move and the second half (database server) after.

It's kinda hard to know how complicated my life will get in the next few weeks. I'm hoping for a Nov 1 move-in date. In any case I'll keep us all updated. But the one thing I don't want to do is buy one, or both servers, and then MOVE them before getting them ready and installed. It'll probably take a week for servers to ship and another week to get them all set up before taking them to Wilmington. Even that schedule is aggressive considering I am hoping to replace disk drives.

That's easy, take a wild-ass guess... then quadruple it. :fingerx:

If you find yourself near Wilmington on a weekend, give me a call. I live nearby and I'd love to have you over for some takeout or BBQ. Bruce is also pretty close to here and maybe he can stop over.

I'm buying boxes to move my household and so the project is on a bit of hold! Life in disarray, a big engineering project should not be affected by that. My new aim will be to have this all worked out by mid-November.

But I've found a nice backup solution: the old Cellar server's hard drive can be replaced, and so it can become a backup server in as short as a week! To that end, I've eBay-bought 400GB of hard drive which can go in the old Cellar chassis.

You do what you gotta do! We're not going anywhere. :)

And thanks, as always.

OK. Putting this project on hold was definitely the right decision. My life went into a much greater level of uncertainty than I ever thought, as I detailed in various threads.

Now is the right time to restart this project. Since about January 5th I've been checking out eBay auctions. What I noticed was that things seemed out of whack due to the holidays...

But on Jan 7th, people were all back to work after the holiday season... and hopefully pulling their used servers out, in auctions that will start to end on the 14th. so I'm going to make it a goal to buy at least one server by the end of next week.

If it doesn't happen, it'll be because it didn't look like good values were falling out yet.

Having a back-n-forth discussion with a seller, over three IBM 306 servers on Craigslist. For $90 each. No hard drives are included, but that is acceptable in a modern rack server.

I don't know if they would even serve our purposes, but they were so cheap that I had to shoot for them. I'm emailing the owner back and forth. Let's see what happens.

I have agreed to meet the guy on Sunday and buy the servers from him directly. They don't have hard drives, they have 2GB of memory... they don't fit the project as written, and I need to make sure they are completely supported by Linux.

But they only cost $90 (plus my mileage) for three IBM 306 servers, and that is a very good deal. So my intention is to try to figure out whether they can become a reasonable way to use them in our project.

They take two hard drives, so at the very least, one of them can be put to use as a backup server. Or all three can be put into a cluster of web servers. But we'll see!

Buy first, engineer later: when there's Craigslist, maybe that's just how it has to be!

I dont think that makes sense.

Why buy them if they can't be used? Unless you can re sell then and turn a profit?

I could surely get even money for them. But I would rather get them running and doing something useful. Even if I can just get 500GB in a RAID configuration out of one of them, that will be helpful.