[rescue] Challenge XL in SE VA Did Not Wait For Me!

[Ethan O'Toole]

>  Looking to hook in a RAID hardware card and one of the monster RAID
> 20-disk SCSI array boxes I already have.  (The other one will be offered
> up
> for salvage, and no, they aren't Clariion boxes, I don't think.  1-, 2-,

I'm sure those old disks have slow IO. You might want to look at a
hardware raid card (Compaq Smartarray if they will work outside of a
Compaq), and then some 10k RPM SCSI disks.

> level and such.  Truthfully I'd rather save the power bill and get a pair
> if nice fast 120+ gig drives to put in there and just use software RAID.

Exactly, modern disks will buy you quite a bit.

We have two PIII-600 dual compaq 1850R's, and they are quite zippy.

> The dual-Xeon box is nice as a workstation, but it just won't keep up with
> the load of the Postfix/Clam/Postfix sandwich with SpamAssassin,

Yea, this is probably your biggest load? All the perl script virus scanner
glue. You might be able to find optimizations, or use two boxes - one to
run crufty glued-together virus scanning / mime removing / spam nuking
programs, and one to do everything else.

> authoritative DNS for four domains now and three more soon to be, Web
> services with virtual hosting for all seven domains, database searches
> going on via a web interface, FTP transfers and the occasional bittorrent
> for ISO's, and so forth.

That all shouldn't take much load at all.

> I am looking into non-Intel UN*X-running RISC hardware, with malice
> aforethought.

As uncool as they are, x86 is fast. I/O is a big thing, and proper disks
for unix boxes that move are expensive. I wish the floor would drop on
SCSI disks but noooo.

> Alpha sounds good, as do the UltraSparc boxen already mentioned.  Gotta
> find really cheap, I'm already over budget with the wife on hardware, and
> she's eyeing a new (computerized, of course) sewing machine for her
> quilting.

One of those ones that can do embrodering? Those seem cool.

-- 
.--[Ethan O'Toole]-------------------------------+
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