Michael Evan Karpeles wrote:
> *ANDREW:* as always, your input has been insightful and informative. 
> I've been doing a lot of stress testing on some machines at work and 
> have come to realize (and appreciate) what can be done with limited RAM. 
> I definitely put a big stink about going for 16 GB of RAM before but (if 
> it comes down to it) I think 8GB would be sufficient for doing the trick.

Well I was thinking about peak usage. Assuming we have about 7 or 8 VMs running 
at a time, with each using ~512MB ram, and then 3-4 people actively using the 
server and another 3-4 logged in with stuff left running, we could probably hit 
that 16GB. Now, some of that could be swapped of course, but at server ram 
prices I think 16 wouldn't be unreasonable. Perhaps if we end up with an i7 
though we could get 12GB and take advantage of the triple-channel architecture 
though.

Of course, if we end up needing desktop ram, things change. I only just now 
noticed that desktop ram is cheaper if you're buying 2GB sticks. Prices actually 
go desktop 2G < server 4G < desktop 2G. So if we're stuck with desktop ram we 
could buy 8G of that (cheaply, too, as low as $90) and wait for prices on 4G 
sticks to come down.

> Andrew, what did you have in mind for RAID schemes? RAID 10? Also, were 
> we looking for hardware raid or software raid? I think your hard drive 
> estimates are about right but it might be nice to look into 4x1TB HDD's 
> so we could potentially serve all of our CSSA tech talk recordings. 
> Granted HDD's are easy enough (and cheap enough) to upgrade in the 
> future. [I'll look into this and shoot an email out at a later point]

Yeah, raid 10. Possibly through btrfs, depending on how stable it is. I don't 
think we'll need 2TB of storage, but it's not too much more expensive. (Even if 
we keep all our tech talks in uncompressed formats, we should be able to fit 3-4 
years on 1.5 TB)

> FINALLY -- anyone know the status of the machines in our lab? Haven't 
> been able to tunnel into them in a while.

My bad, I'm in there a few times a week, and I usually turn stuff off if it 
doesn't look used. e.g. deadowlsurvivor was turned on and no one had logged in 
since it was turned on yesterday. Pong has stayed on, but I figured if someone 
needed one on they'd mail the list to make sure it wasn't turned off.

Finally, someone came by the other day saying something about a SunBlade 1000? 
Apparently it's now in votey 122 waiting for us to pick it up. Who arranged that 
for us? (I heard something about craigslist?)

--Andrew