| Upgrades, etc... | by lmbedore |
| We're planning on doing some network upgrades. We will be building two 1U DNS servers in the near future, probably right around the end of the year. We are also looking at 10/100 rackmount switches (preferrably managed switches) to replace the current 10mbit repeaters we are using right now. I'd like to get Cisco 2900 or 3500 series switches, but that probably won't happen with just my pocketbook.
Apathy is currently far more powerful than is needed to run VectorStar Networks, but since we're geeks and love playing with new hardware, it will probably get upgraded to a dual PIII-Coppermine 933 or faster system in early 2002. We do not yet have RAM (most likely RDRAM) or CPUs for this upgrade. These upgrades will run us about $1000 for the two DNS servers, about $500 for Apathy, and who-knows-how-much for the switches. If you would like to contribute to VectorStar's future, we will gladly accept donations via PayPal to lmbedore@vectorstar.com. If you donate, please mention your VectorStar UserID so we can make our thanks to you. Additionally, we're looking at selling T-shirts and such through CafePress for donation money. If you have any ideas for slogans or want to do something cool with our logo, send it up to us! Otherwise I'll be busting out my rusty Photoshop skills to work up a shirt-friendly logo. Maybe we'll make a 8==W==D shirt to make Pogo happy. :) | |
| Re: Upgrades, etc... | by jdaunt |
| And if you currently don't have an account with Paypal and sign-up, they give you $5.00 free. That way you can donate $5.00 to us by just spending a couple of minutes on Paypal's site typing in some information. | |
| Re: Upgrades, etc... | by stale |
| I think jason needs a shirt that says, "You think you look good in that car," on the front. We all know what it should say on the back. | |
| Re: Upgrades, etc... | by jdaunt |
| Very good idea. That would make a good gift for everyone's child at Christmas. | |
| Re: Upgrades, etc... | by brian |
| Thought about an unmanaged switch? You can do a 10/100 autosense thing for dirt, not long ago I bought an 8 port netgear for a little over a hundred bux. | |
| Re: Upgrades, etc... | by lmbedore |
| We've got 10/100 full duplex NWAY switches of all sorts (we've got 3 sitting around the house right now!), but the problem is that we'll be using a network-storage method to all 'interactive' servers (web server, mail server, etc).
100 megabits per second comes out to a theoretical 12 megabytes per second transfer in and out of the file server... 12 MBps really sucks. Just imagine the disk I/O on an old Macintosh computer... that was 10 MBps. A server with that kind of throughput wouldn't be very fun to share with 500 other people :( A managed switch would at least let us channel-bond 4 channels into the file server, until we can get gigabit all around. that gives 40-48MB/sec, which is good and fast. That'll probably be the maximum sustained throughput of the disk array anyways... :) | |