Are you going to bring a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and drives to the meet? Make sure you're not buying paperweights?

Not at $30 each.

It's off anyway - they guy emailed yesterday to say that his company wanted to recycle the servers on their own.

Craigslist: so often just a big old waste of time :mad:

Booo. :(

In my personal experience, you have to act quickly. emailing back and forth for 3 days... too much can go wrong. you see it on there.... you want it... you go see it in person.... before someone else does.

maybe I've just been lucky. Motorcycle, washer dryer, couch loveseat... all done within 2 days of seeing them.

jim--i'm gonna make a thread someday called when threads collide.

i like and value your advice, this time in the stone bumming thread regarding car stuff, and here regarding craigslist stuff. i really do have to go out for a while, but whne I get back, i want to talk to you and all y'all about (another0 car on craigslist. I'm interested in getting a honda Element. it will be a second car, this one might have some other future driver, we'll see.

anyhow. thanks man.

eBay values are just about now returning to "normal"...

Pulled the trigger! On two of these:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/PowerEdge-R2...item20ce7bfb0e

One will be the Cellar server and one will be the Database server. I'll be buying four hard drives and two sets of memory to go along with 'em. There is research to do to buy the memory.

Also, this seller offers rack rails for the system for $89. I'm getting one of those and the other system can just sit on top of it.

This is a generation newer than the 2950 I was thinking about, which is great, and since the hard drives and memory will be new, it will be a perfect solution for us.

sounds good!

Servers are here!

And also the rack rails, which will make installation that much easier.

Now to buy the memory. Section 7 of the R210 Technical Guide (PDF) explains what kinds it can use: Unbuffered ECC DDDR3 DIMMs, speeds of 1066/1333, 16GB Maximum capacity spread out over 4 DIMM sockets, support for 1GB, 2GB or 4GB in all configurations, but no 8GB in slot 1 only.

It would be nice to just specify 16GB in four sticks of 4GB x 2. But the budget says, let's put 4GB in the DB and 8GB in the main server. It's really all they need. Crucial.com has a configurator which drills down to exactly what is compatible. So we didn't really need to read Section 7 of the R210 Technical Guide. But we know a little more for having done so.

Bought.

I have a vague recollection of DIMM memory.

Now the drives. My intention is to run two drives in each server, in RAID 1 configuration. That means one drive can fail, and the other drive will take over until the first drive is replaced.

Section 11 of the R210 Technical Guide covers which drives are compatible. If we want to be cheap, SATA 3.5"/7.2K: 160, 250, or 1000GB, 2000GB. If we want to be all crazy performance oriented, SAS 3.5”/15K: 146, 300, or 450GB, 600GB.

We can't afford to pay $375 for 146GB SAS drives so we will have to settle for the cheap: 4 1TB SATA drives. I favor the Western Digital Black and their 5 year warranty.

Bought.

:D

Goddamn but time is flying past. I forgot to document it but remember a few posts back when a Craigslist guy didn't come through on servers he thought he was allowed to sell for his company? He actually did come through a two weeks ago, when he emailed me to offer a Dell 2950 for $250, with 8GB, including rack rails. No disks.

Although this puts us over budget already on this project, I couldn't resist. The Dell 2950 is a much better storage server with its 6 hot-swappable full-size disk docks. All I need to do with that is get the disk caddies -- and the disks of course -- and this can be a really sweet system for us.

Cool.