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Sure, they're mostly servers, but they do have Workstations. They'll even sell you Windows if you want it. http://pogolinux.com/

If I had to build a NAS/SAN on the cheap for work it would be something based off of OpenSolaris/ZFS. The amount of features you'll get out of ZFS/Opensolaris for free can't be beat. Really worth a look. A few products that I would say to look at are: http://www.pogolinux.com/nexenta.php http://www.nexenta.com/corp/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=148 http://www.nexenta.org/os and of course: http://www.opensolaris.com/

Pogo Linux has some nice gear for cheap.

The short answer is yes, plenty of machines built for Linux.

Here are a couple of links :

Servers, desktops etc : http://www.pogolinux.com/
Laptops ! http://www.emperorlinux.com/

The laptops are well-known brands (IBM/Lenovo, Dell etc) with Linux pre-installed and supported, where everything work, including modem, wireless, suspend-to-ram, etc.

Well, at least the development and test process would be fun.

And based on what I have heard, most SATA raid-5 controllers are not quite ready for prime time, although I did recently interview with one outfit that was running their whole enterprise on Pogo Linux StorageWare boxes:

http://pogolinux.com/storage/sata/storagewaresata. html

I dunno. I would want to pound the crap out of them for a few months before I committed. Worse, in my last job we had zero budget and a bunch of ancient DL380s with hardware raid; nothing bad ever happened but it kept me awake at night, mostly thinking of new scripts I had to install to make sure every box was at least rsync'ed somewhere else. Now, I'm fortunate to work at a place that can afford EMC and Sun, SCSI and FC stuff. Nothing ever breaks, ever, and I sleep like a baby.

> I guess if you want RAID, you pay more than $3,000.

Now that's just plain silly. A basic x86 1U server runs around $1100 with two hard drives configured in software RAID1, which works wonderfully other than not allowing hotswap and preventing boot if the first drive is the one that fails. For another $150 or so you can add a hardware RAID card to fix both of those things and get slightly better performance.

There is absolutely NO excuse for not running a raid on any modern server. Drives are the most likely component to fail, the most critical if they do (even if you replace it, you've still lost all your data), and are cheap as dirt. Any sysadmin still using single drive configs should have their head examined.

http://www.pogolinux.com/cgi-bin/systemconfigurato r.cgi?system=katanablade

"The Pogo Linux Katana Blade Server supports twelve compute blades with up to 24 AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon processors in a compact 4U chassis. Each Katana Blade server features up to 16 Gigabit Ethernet ports and 24 SATA hard drives. With an integrated KVM switch and remote GUI management software, the Katana Blade Server is the perfect solution for enterprise businesses looking to consolidate their current server infrastructure while simplifying network management..."

I've had good luck with http://www.pogolinux.com/ .

These guys build some very sweet boxes, they have been at LFNW the last 2 years (that I know of). Take a look at 3.5T for $10k here at their site -- and no this isn't because they gave me a free hat.

bcl

PogoLinux.Com StorageWare

A truly open market will provide options.

• HP
• Apple
• Sun
• Penguincomputing
• pogolinux

I thought LFNW was awesome. I especially enjoyed the Pacific Northwest National Labs High Performance Linux Cluster talk given by Timothy A Witteveen of PNL. It is one hell of a machine. It is one hell of a machine. 9.4 teraflops and a 53 terrabyte SAN running NWLinux. It placed 5th on the last Top 500 List.

That 53 terrabyte SAN is one contiguous filesystem using lustre. The use of QSNet2/Elan4 interconnects make the use of terbyte data sets with lots of internode communication more efficient than past machines. These interconnects provide a peak bandwidth of 340 MB/sec in each direction. But even more impresive than the bandwidth is the latency, between 2 us and 5 us. Compare that with ethernet latency measured in tens or even hundreds of ms.

During the presentation Tim went over two examples of simulations performed on their cluster that could not be accomplished on other machines. These examples were outside of my domain of knowledge, but one involved simulating the behavior of water molecules and the other was an extremely detailed protein folding simulation.

One last bit that was interesting was their methodology for updating the machines. They have over a thousand and took some time to determine an efficient means to keep the machines up to date. It was determined that reimaging the maches was faster than applying patches. They utilize a multicast approach in which allows them, theoretically, to reimage all of the machines in 28 minutes. They do not always reach this theoretical maximum, but they reimage a thousand machines PDQ.

The meet & greet in the commons was fun. Pogo Linux had a free drawing for a loaded AMD64 system. There was plenty of swag to be had from all sorts of folks. It was cool to stop and chat with one of the Helix developers. All in all there was a really good group of folks gathered.

I know Slashdot is full of trolls, but I must say I am a little suprised at how many crappy comments LFNW is getting. All I have to say to those filled with negativity is screw you. Here in the Pacific Northwest we have some cool stuff going on. Whether it is the 3 new lugs in Seattle, OSDL in Portland, the Linux Cluster at PNL, SeattleWireless, PersonalTelco or LFNW there are exciting things happening up here. I think a couple people on this site need to take their heads out of their arses and take a look around. Folks up here are using linux, and getting stuff done.

But do they run linux?

Technically, Yes...or is it the other way around?

I've got one of pogolinux's Storageware devices, running RH AS3 (versus the RH9 it came "with"...got the disks 3 days after the device. No matter, now).

Anyway, this thing has 32 of those *BRIGHT* blue led's...16 are constatntly lit when the drives are powered, and the other 16 during access. With the drives all in raid 5, you can imagine the flashing.

Also imagine the noise of 4 (guess on my part so far) 5K to 7.2Krpm fans going off. Yikes.

The only other colors are a green led for network access, and IIRC amber for power.

What still amuses me about this box is that the power and reset buttons are the size of #2 pencil leads. I suppose it reduces accidental resets/power offs, but the buttons being smaller then all the led's is quite funny/amusing.

First of all, this is exactly what IBM is doing , targeting the high end of the spectrum. Particularly Linux on Mainframes and what not. There is a huge market in the corporate world for high end Linux computing, in part replacing Unix mainframes.

But also there are several vendors of High end Linux Workstations. Folks like ASL, PogoLinux, Micronux and the list goes on. Here the market niche is scientific/tech workstations, and yes, they are typically high end.

The market that is still not ripe for High end Linux workstations is the power gamer home PC, and this is the one probably holding WalMart, HP and others back on high end Linux PCs

For example:

• SuSE 9.0 Pro for amd64.
• SuSE Enterprise Server 8 for amd64.
• Mandrake 9.2rc1 for amd64.
• Fedora Core1 test1 for amd64.
• Gentoo's amd64 info
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS & WS are available for amd64.

I've been using Gentoo's amd64 stuff for a little while on my new Shuttle Box. Things are generally good although there are still a lot of packages that are masked. KDE is also problematic which may be a turn-off for some people.

A colleague just got a new dual-opteron Workstation from Pogo and is running SuSE 9.0 pro for amd64 and is rather happy -- just about everything plays nicely.

Multimedia has significant problems on both systems. No flash player for 64-bit, mplayer and related multimedia requiring 32-bit codecs. Nvidia amd 64 drivers require some patching if they work at all, at least as of last wednesday.

Otherwise quite happy with all of these. Mandrake claims to have multimedia stuff working properly (see above link for info) but wants to eat my partition table so I haven't checked it out yet.

--
"Now you'll see why they call me the Velour Fog" --Zapp Brannigan, 25-star General & Cpt.

For example:

• SuSE 9.0 Pro for amd64.
• SuSE Enterprise Server 8 for amd64.
• Mandrake 9.2rc1 for amd64.
• Fedora Core1 test1 for amd64.
• Gentoo's amd64 info
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS & WS are available for amd64.

I've been using Gentoo's amd64 stuff for a little while on my new Shuttle Box. Things are generally good although there are still a lot of packages that are masked. KDE is also problematic which may be a turn-off for some people.

A colleague just got a new dual-opteron Workstation from Pogo and is running SuSE 9.0 pro for amd64 and is rather happy -- just about everything plays nicely.

Multimedia has significant problems on both systems. No flash player for 64-bit, mplayer and related multimedia requiring 32-bit codecs. Nvidia amd 64 drivers require some patching if they work at all, at least as of last wednesday.

Otherwise quite happy with all of these. Mandrake claims to have multimedia stuff working properly (see above link for info) but wants to eat my partition table so I haven't checked it out yet.

--
"Now you'll see why they call me the Velour Fog" --Zapp Brannigan, 25-star General & Cpt.

I wish KDE and GNOME could have some sort of truce and just make the a collabritive effort to help the Desktop. None of the projects work together even though they all depend on each other.

Odd, they have had a truce, and Blucurve is part of Fedora Core 1.

Tryknoppix for KDE 3.1 and Debian Unstable and Slackware and Mandrake for both Gnome 2.4, and KDE 3.1. (they now share a desktop now mind you)

I thnk that most of the "fanboys", or people who acutaly took the time to learn and use Linux would agree with me that in the past year alone there has been exponential progres with KDE and GNOME to the point that they really are ready for the desktop, if not very very close.
A year ago the parent(s) might have been accurate a year ago but not they are just troll.

PogoLinux is sponsoring two busses for the trip, which will be leaving North Seattle Community Colloge (the place where GSLUG meets) and heading up to Bellingham the morning of the fest. To sign up, go to their signup page. I believe we'll be watching "RevolutionOS" on the trip, plus you get to extend your geeky day by being surrounded by linux and open source advocates for 3 hours of fun in addition to the fest. And you don't need to do the driving. What could be better than that?

PogoLinux is sponsoring two busses for the trip, which will be leaving North Seattle Community Colloge (the place where GSLUG meets) and heading up to Bellingham the morning of the fest. To sign up, go to their signup page. I believe we'll be watching "RevolutionOS" on the trip, plus you get to extend your geeky day by being surrounded by linux and open source advocates for 3 hours of fun in addition to the fest. And you don't need to do the driving. What could be better than that?

I've used several ISP/CoLo sites over the past six years and have been with PogoLinux for the past two.

I'm very happy with them, $149 a month for their hardware at their site (15 GB xfer/month). I've paid more to CoLo my own boxes.

You have root access on your box.

Had no service interruptions or power outages since I've been with them. I just checked my uptime and it was 292 days, I bounced it earlier this year after patching something.

Anyways, I'm not affiliated, etc, but I've been very happy with PogoLinux.

Looks like they are right across from Pogo Linux.
By the way - I have purchased 2 machines from them and have been very happy with the hardware & setup. Them being PogoLinux, of course.

pogolinux *does* make dual-P4 Xeons in a 1U form factor, but who knows what kind of cooling system they need :)

PogoLinux

HP

Nixit

HP/Compaq

and now Walmart.

There are probably others too.

The winux name has been used before.

While the Pogo phone/MP3 player/PDA/Web browser/underwear changer is, like many others, trying to fill the "convergence" void - I think I'll stick with this Pogo, which seems to be a lot more secure and reliable.

As a Worldcon 2002 member, I'm going to vote for Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter for Dramatic Presentation (you get to vote for five)...

And hey, Taco, take the time to Googlesearch for the Suggested Nominees and get the poll right, eh? Spelling too? Or is that too much to ask...

--
Shipping the Penguin in Bill's backyard...

It is possible corrupt the data in an RPM file so code is executed on a Linux system when the RPM is queried for version information.

Buffer overflow, or more MSNBC FUD?

I could see a buffer overflow happening in rpm, but really, I don't put anything past Unca Bill... particularly when Smith Barney today just put out a downgrade on MSFT that basically said the guys in Redmond have jumped the shark with XP and the XBox...

--
Shipping Penguins in Bill's backyard...

"Also, with CORBA, the overheads are VAST. X is bad enough, but CORBA is a nightmare. One of the important considerations in a system like this is who will use it. If you're talking home users, then you need a protocol with as close to zero overhead as possible, whilst still allowing as much flexibility & dynamicism as possible. CORBA doesn't cut it, either way. "

1) XFree86 4.whatever is perfectly snappy on my 3 year-old PIII 450 with a 3 year-old video card.
2) Do you have any idea just how much performance $1,714 plus shipping can get you right now? This bad boy has to be four times as fast as my box.
3) Next year the cheapest thing you can buy will perform like that.
4) If it is even barely useable now, there is little reason to worry about performance by the time the project has had a chance to mature.

As seen in a post yesterday, although I haven't used them yet: www.pogolinux.com

Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!

Oh, and No I will not get one of those gay "ooh, I want that one cause it's got lavender plastic on it" VAIOS just b/c they have somehow become the cool thing to put linux on as if Sony wasn't one of the most Microsoft-wannabe companies out there (don't get me started on how they got Trinitron or their many shitty tactics with PS2 buildup).

VA seems to have thought that the way to be the next Dell was to only sell Intel systems. Too bad the last 1-2 years have been Intel's worst years ever. Who wants way overpriced PIII systems when they can get rippin' Dual AthlonMP systems (Vorticon )from Pogo for less than $2000?

VA seems to have thought that the way to be the next Dell was to only sell Intel systems. Too bad the last 1-2 years have been Intel's worst years ever. Who wants way overpriced PIII systems when they can get rippin' Dual AthlonMP systems (Vorticon )from Pogo for less than $2000?