Upgrading our mail server

[Paul Schmehl]

--On Thursday, September 14, 2006 11:45:49 -0500 Greg Groth 
<ggroth at gregs-garage.com> wrote:
>
> Are any of the major server brands more FreeBSD friendly than others? I'm
> looking to purchase a server for some web apps.  Our current config is
> running on a 6 year old Dell PowerEdge machine with SCSI RAID 5, 1 Ghz
> processor, 32 gig total disk capacity, and a gig of RAM.  Upgrading this
> machine would cost more than it's worth.  Boss insists on a name brand
> server (Dell, HP, Gateway, etc).  Budget is in the $2K range.  I'd rather
> stay away from SATA at this point due to the incredible amount of
> difficulty I experienced putting together a MythTV box earlier this year,
> and go with SCSI.  If no one has specific recommendations, are there any
> specifics that are definite show stoppers that I should pay attention to
> when reviewing specs?
>
I just bought a Dell 1950 rack mount with two 73GB SAS drives (3.5 inch, 
15K RPM), PERC 5/i integrated card, RAID 1, DRAC, 3.2GB processor, 2GB RAM, 
etc.  It was $2800+ including shipping.  I *think* you can get down to the 
$2000 range by downgrading the processor and memory and getting smaller 
drives, but it's not going to be easy.  (I'll be installing FreeBSD 6.1 
RELEASE on it tonight.)

Paul Schmehl (pauls at utdallas.edu)
Adjunct Information Security Officer
The University of Texas at Dallas
http://www.utdallas.edu/ir/security/