"tao" suddenly died

[Adam Vande More]

On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 9:34 PM, Gary Kline <kline at thought.org> wrote:

>        Aloha Al and thanks for responding.  {god this has been a
>        long day... .  ............}
>
>        Well, long-story-short, the most unepect thing happened: a
>        power surge.  I did not realize that my printer was also off
>        until hours later.  A friend helped me trace the problem and
>        reset my surgge-protector.  ---It is worth noting that BEFORE
>        I got my battery [UPS], when things were dead or suddenly
>        went dead, i  knew right away to check the surge-protector.
>
>        nutshell: things are almost back.  it'll be only an hour
>        before everything is back.
>
>        still, this is a warning to get back on the ball and start
>        looking for a new desktop.
>
>        i would be much obliged for ideas on what kind of dell to buy
>        next.  i say 'dell' because i would like to make life simple
>        and eventually have one kind of box.  (i have three tower
>        computers: one is my DNS/mail/web server; one is my pfSense
>        firewall; one is my laptop.  i COULD use the server as a
>        desktop, but that would be too much of a risk!
>
>        so:: should i be looking for a dual or quad?  ----i am biased
>        toward intel because i think the AMD requires more juice.  [[my
>        only linux server --long dead-- seemed to suck 100w to 107w as
>        a minimum.]]
>
>        suggestions?
>

I don't really think much of Dell consumer level products or support.  While
they aren't the worst out there, it still doesn't make it very compelling
for me.  Depending on your resources(money) you might consider something
like this:

http://www.ixsystems.com/apollo

While more money than you'd probably spend with dell, here's a couple
reasons to consider it further.

1.  Out the Box compatibility
2.  Great hardware support/warranty service
3.  Vendor backing of your OS
4.  Long term upgradability, this will serve you better than any emachine.
5.  ixsystems is a large supporter of FreeBSD

I believe the TCO of something like that is lower than most alternatives.

One further thought is I don't see a lot sense in the requirement "must be a
dell, cause the other ones I have are dell" given the amount of machines you
run.  To me, it would make more sense to standardize on something like cpu,
so that you could run one as a build system/package repository.  I know that
settling on one vendor generally means you only need one source for warranty
work, but with stickers on cases and online accounts this isn't such an
issue anymore.


-- 
Adam Vande More