Server hardware

[John Levine]

>My question -- are any server vendors well recommended for FreeBSD?

I bought a used HP Proliant DL385 for about $300 on ebay, then loaded
it up with 8GB of RAM (making a total of 12GB) for another $200.
Works great, FBSD 8.1 groks all the controllers, even produces
appropriate syslog messages when I pull a disk out from the RAID and
replace it.  I got it when I realized it included a good remote
console and the whole thing was about the same price as an add-on
remote console for my old server.

It's got six 73GB 15K rpm disks, for a total of 360GB usable very fast
disk, which sounds like less than you want, but you get get these
things with six hot swap SATA slots and put in whatever disks you
want.

They're kind of pricey when new, but you can usually find last year's
model cheap on ebay.  I also used to build my own, but at prices like
this there's no point.  It's noisy and power hungry, so I'd only put
it in a data center, not in my office.

R's,
John