Slashdot Mirror

eRacks

That reminds me of my next laptop: LapStudio. It's definitely not cheap, but may be a forerunner of similar, cheaper systems. I've been using Linux for sound/music/video compositing for a while now...LMMS is also a pretty cool software package; you can see a little demo I uploaded to Youtube. It's been fun to work with.

http://eracks.com/products/General%20Purpose/config?sku=QUADPREM

or you're doing it wrong?

eRacks website error

eRacks has encountered an error while publishing this resource.

Error Type: KeyError
Error Value: 'Xeon Systems'
Troubleshooting Suggestions

This resource may be trying to reference a nonexistent object or variable 'Xeon Systems'.
The URL may be incorrect.
The parameters passed to this resource may be incorrect.
A resource that this resource relies on may be encountering an error.
For more detailed information about the error, please refer to the HTML source for this page.

If the error persists please contact the site maintainer. Thank you for your patience.

So either they don't have Xeon Servers (so no identically configured node) or...

Thanks for the link! My company has ordered equipment from places like eracks, but I wasn't impressed. System 76 seems a bit more polished. Does anyone have other recommendations?

eRacks and Hawk are two of the commonly-suggested vendors that sell machines with hardware specifically chosen for OpenBSD compat (and will even pre-install, if that's your thing). I'd suggest any 1U generic box built in the last 5 years with 512-1024MB of RAM. Good NICs are going to be more important than CPU (fxp(4) is a good choice; see the misc@openbsd.org archives, since this question comes up regularly). Either of the above vendors (or others; check Google for "openbsd rackmount server") should be able to get you a 1U box with a good quad-port card in it (use the built-in port(s) for the management channel). Get a pair of identical machines and set up carp(4) so they can do failover and you should be set. You can terminate VPNs using isakmpd(8) or you can just use OpenSSH (supports tunneling any arbitrary traffic, including layer 2 stuff, as of v4.3).

Here's My account of a recent still ongoing experience with Eracks
I ordered two 1U servers servers from Eracks on 9/6/05 and paid with a
credit card. I received a order confirmation within a few minutes.

Seven Days later on the 13th I had still had not heard from Eracks or received the equipment. I made email
and inquiries and then went to the website to look for the phone number for Eracks. The phone number
was not on the website only the Fax number and support email addresses. A couple of whois queries later
I had a phone number and placed the first of Many calls to Eracks. This time I only got to leave voicemail
as there was no response.

On the 14th there was still no response to my emails of voicemail messages so I got on the phone and got
a person this time. This person "Fred" was farmiliar with my order and confirmed that the servers would
ship at the end of the week or early the following week on or around the 16th or 19th and that I could
expect tracking numbers via email when they shipped.

Sept 19th no tracking numbers so I called again to see what was going on. Fred was now telling me that
there was a problem with the motherboards on the systems I ordered and that they needed to be replaced.
I could expect the servers to ship on the 21st.

Sept 21st Hooray tracking numbers! Shipper says that I should expect shipment around the 23rd.

Sept 23rd thru Sept 26th No shipment

Sept 26th No shipment On this day I call DHL to figure out where the shipment is. DHL tells me that the
shipment was never received on the sender end and that I will not be receiving shipment on those tracking
numbers.

Calls into Eracks that morning were met with confusion and requests to call back later when the
"shipping guys were in" Fred was also unavailable.

Later that day I did receive a call from Fred and he explained that there was a mixup on their end and
that the servers did not ship as scheduled on the 21st. There were some vague references to lengthy
burn in testing and other factors that delayed shipment. My inquiries as to why these details took a week
uncover and communicate with me were met with silence. Fred promises to ship the servers next day on the
28th.

Sept 28th servers ship according to UPS tracking information.

Sept 29th Both servers arrived, after unboxing the servers servers I proceeded to attach the rackmount
brackets to the case on the first server. They did not fit! I took some digital picures of the
cases and the brackets and emailed these to Eracks hoping for some new rackmount brackets with a hole
pattern that matched the cases they sent me. I was issued a case number by the support system.

Sept 29th I started a destructive read write test on the disks on the first system. This was in response
to the shipping schock sensors being tripped.
Sept 30th thru Oct 3rd no response on rackmount bracket problem. In fact I never heard from Eracks
support on this issue.

Oct 3rd System 1 built for customer and deployed. I had to eat the cost of some rack mount shelves for the
customer because of useless rack mount brackets shipped with the servers.

Oct 4th thru Oct 10th no response on rackmount bracket problem.

Oct 11th System fails midmorning. Subsequent investigation shows a probable disk controller or disk failure.

Oct 11th 8:45 am Email to support@eracks.com and Fred outlining problem and requesting callback

Oct 12th 9:30 am voicemail live personnel not available left at Eracks same information as above.
Oct 12th 10:30 am call attempt voicemail system again.
Oct 12th 4:00pm call reaches Fred. I explain the situation, my unhappiness with the systems and
the complete lack of support . I explain that I will be returning both systems as I have already
secured and installed replacements

We recently purchased a NAS from eRacks, which we are happy with & is slightly less expensive than the options you posted.

Ther are MANY tutorials on building your own RAIDed NAS on the net. Some have been slashdotted. Here's one. Google for others.

I actually think that the XServe returns quite a bit for what you pay them. You can DIY for perhaps 1/4 of the price & a lot of time & some cursing. If you want a cheaper solution, I have been fairly happy with a recent purchase from eRacks. If you want something a little more end, get a SNAP serve or something similar. Or, get a couple of those 1 TB external disks & use software RAID 1.

There's a whole niche market for "stripped-down versions of Linux" that handle things like this.

Currently, I'm using Mikrotik RouterOS as a core router. It's at a small ISP -- 400 or so high-speed customers, 3000 dialup customers (400-500 of which are connected during peak times). Standard routing stuff (30 or so internal static routes, big deal). Couple hundred firewall rules (some for stopping Windows worms from spreading, some for general network security, some to help keep the nastier spammers in check). And BGP, taking a full BGP feed from our upstream, plus a couple multihops from places like Cymru's bogons project. And it doubles as a PPTP server so I can securely work from home (in a gesture of supreme irony, I can't get Internet connectivity from the company I work at).

And some other stuff I can't think of right now.

All this is running in a 1U system I got from eRacks (they make good cheap stuff), except for the hard drive, which I yanked and replaced with a 64MB IDE-flash drive from these guys. Celeron 1.3GHz, 512MB RAM. The system never ever, even during peak times, goes over 10% CPU load.

This isn't quite up to the specs the original author was looking for, mainly because this hardware isn't also doing the T1 stuff. (It's got plain old boring Ethernet to an older Cisco router, to which our four T1s are connected, but the Cisco is basically just a really big media converter.) But given how low the hardware utilization is on this unit, and how underpowered this system is as compared to current hardware, I think it shows that the notion is quite feasible.

-- MarkusQ

By specifying "x86 architecture", your artificially limiting the marketplace. You might as well artificially limit that marketplace to Dell, then whine about the "Intel tax" since Dell doesn't offer AMD chips.

The actual marketplace is not "x86 architecture", but "laptops with office productivity and networking functionality". In such a market, Apple and Sun notebooks are viable options.

But to stop your whining, I'll tell you about one Windows-free x86 architecture laptop. There are many many more. eRacks

Thank you. The MySQL developers have made it clear that adding the features required to have a SQL-compatible RDBMS is not something they're going to do, especially if it sacrifices "speed" (in a day where 1U Athlon 1600+ servers can be purchased for $995, and RAM is cheap enough that you could practically load the DB into a ramdisk). I've been developing a web store based on PHP/PostgreSQL for the past month, and I've found it to be 10 times better than mysql (the previous attempt). Just basic stuff like nested queries, and we all know that MySQL doesn't have transaction support. MySQL 4 might, but that's not the current version.