Recommendation for Dual-CPU systems

[Melvyn Sopacua]

Hi,

we're looking around for our next hardware generation and don't like to 
reinvent the wheel. The current generation is very stable, but the one before 
that had problems, prolly in the motherboard, which we never we're able to 
solve, using various BSD flavours.

The machines will primarily do webserving, which means php/apache with some 
postfix mail for alerts. Most of the sites will be MySQL backed, which will 
run on different servers. The busiest site handles about 6GB of traffic per 
day (600k requests for content only - seperate grafics server), consisting of 
primarily of news. Others vary greatly.

The reason for the dual CPU is that we want to be able to host more per 
machine, to reduce maintenance. We have done some orientation and experience 
with ASUS boards, but the results are very variable.

We're looking for systems in the Netherlands, price range 1500 - 2500 euro's, 
1 or 2u 19" rackmount systems.

We've also informed with Dell, but they won't support FreeBSD, so my question 
is twofold:
1) I still see a lot of people on the lists working with Dell machines, so how 
do they work around the "no support" issue? Is this really an issue when a 
disk crashes or some other hardware component?
2) Does anybody know of a hardware supplier that DOES support FreeBSD, 
preferably operating in The Netherlands.

Also - if anybody wishes to share the hardware setup that they're working with 
for similar tasks, based upon an Intel P-IV or Xeon >= 2.4GHz, I'd welcome 
that.

Many thanx in advance.
-- 
Melvyn

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FreeBSD sarevok.webteckies.org 5.2-CURRENT FreeBSD 5.2-CURRENT #3: Tue Dec 30 
14:31:47 CET 2003     
root at sarevok.idg.nl:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/SAREVOK_NOAPM_NODEBUG  i386
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