Upgrading our mail server

[Jerry McAllister]

On Thu, Sep 14, 2006 at 11:56:24AM -0500, Paul Schmehl wrote:

> --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?

There is a company calling itself FreeBSD systems that claims to
make servers especially for BSD Unix.   I don't know about the 
price points.  I think they are kind of hard core heavy duty servers.
Their web site is:
                      http://www.freebsdsystems.com/

I seem to remember once seeing another site that hyped their servers 
as especially for BSD, but this is the only one I have an address for.

The Dell machine mentioned below doesn't sound bad either if all
the devices are happy with FreeBSD.

////jerry

> >
> 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/