Slashdot Mirror

Monarch Computers (Linux Journal runs on them) is pretty reasonable but I'm also looking at the Sun offerings.

We evaluated quite a few vendors recently as well. When buying say a terabyte linux file server, make sure to get adequate cooling, good sturdy chassises etc. For example, Monarch would not let us pick a CIdesign chassis which has a good reputation, so we didn't go with them.

At the very least talk to Net Express They are very knowledgable when it comes to putting together custom linux servers.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Net Express.

Exactly. It's the cost difference, and it's huge.

I've just setup two SATA RAID5 systems. One came all packaged from Netex, the other I built.

So far I'm loving it. For $6k we got a ~800MB raid5 box serving files to 70 users. You can't beat that price.

Here's a way to get and enforce structure in Word documents.

Word allows named styles, and with View>Normal you can even show the stylenames on the screen (Tools>Options>Style area width).You can create a template with paragraph and character styles that correspond to the structure you want. The template can hack the toolbars: put your styles on a toolbar and in the pop-up menu, if you want. Have the template change the Save command to save docs in rtf.

Users write in Word. Save into the CMS. In the CMS gui, choose validate or finish.

The CMS gui then launches a series of processes. First, convert the rtf to xml-like tags, based on the styles used in the document. Second, run some clean-up script to make a well-formed xml document. Third, run a script to do any validations that xml can't handle. Fourth, run a standard xml validator. If the validator finds a problem, you fix it back in Word. You only edit Word files. To preview, translate down to xhtml.

Users will have to cooperate, but then they're usually paid to cooperate. RTF is nasty, but this is as straightforward a conversion as you can get. The biggest problem is Word's lists. You could either guess at lists based on formatting, or require (hidden) begin/end list paragraph styles.

I think this approach could let you escape Word. Next upgrade, you could switch to Star Office or KWord.

A little more detail.

My company has been doing a lot of research on drive storage solutions and we've looked at what Maxtor has to offer. We've considered rolling our own solution by purchasing the new 80G Maxtor drives and plunking them into a rack mountable server case, which is about 2x as tall as Maxtor's solution.

It would be around $1800 for (6) 80G drives, $450 for the rack and then another $550 for memory, motherboard, extra controller and processor. The total amount would be about $2800 for 480G of unRAIDed drive storage or 320G of RAIDed storage. That works out to either $5.83 a Gig for unRAIDed or $8.75 a Gig for RAIDed.

That's less than 2/3 the cost of Maxtor's solution and you can run your choice of OS and network file system.

Kord Campbell
http://www.grub.org

Anyway, I highly reccomend getting a mother board that can do 2 processors and if you need save the money by getting only one processor now.

The Net Express site is a great site for doing research when building a system.
hope it helps

I started pricing an Ultra 5 system on their "online buying" system, and as soon as I added the base-model CPU to the base system, this brought the price from $2550 to about $3700.

And this didn't actually include a monitor...

I would be vastly more interested to hear that someone was offering inexpensive ( e.g. - priced under $500) motherboards.

Net Express offers SPARC mobos for as "little" as $1510.

Cycle CC and Opus SPARCard represent possible alternatives, but when they don't publicize pricing, that usually suggests that you don't want to know...