One of my good friends and I used to work as engineers at an animation company, and on one of our lunch breaks we decided to visit a local high end video/rendering outfit to get a tour. We walked around to appreciate the O2s and Octanes, went into the server room to check out a rather nice Alpha rendering cluster, rounded a corner, and were confronted by a rather large Cray T3D cabinet. Holy crap.
Just then, while we were still dazed with awe, an engineer walked past, yanked the front open, and pulled out his freshly printed reference materials.
Apparently, the owner of the company had bought the (empty) case from Cray after he watched two delivery guys drop it off the back of a loading dock. Unfortunately, at that time, the case had been quite full of Cray Goodness. Ouch.
In order to impress potential customers, he stuck it in his server room with a couple nice printers inside. Not a bad trick.
I'm currently running a server for my friends and relatives. We were a pretty tight knit group in high school, but now we're scattered all over the United States and New Zealand, going to school, traveling, working, etc. It's not a big group, only 25 or so people, but it works.
It's great -- we have forums, a web based instant messaging system, web mail, file archives, and a handful of domains for people's personal sites. It's really helped us stay in touch.
As far as funding goes, everyone chips in. The server is hosted at Rackspace, and between all the people involved it costs about $6 per month each, which is really affordable, even for us student types.
It's a very successful system, in my opinion. If anyone's curious about my experiences setting it up, or has any questions, send me an e-mail.
Slashdot Mirror
One of my good friends and I used to work as engineers at an animation company, and on one of our lunch breaks we decided to visit a local high end video/rendering outfit to get a tour. We walked around to appreciate the O2s and Octanes, went into the server room to check out a rather nice Alpha rendering cluster, rounded a corner, and were confronted by a rather large Cray T3D cabinet. Holy crap.
Just then, while we were still dazed with awe, an engineer walked past, yanked the front open, and pulled out his freshly printed reference materials.
Apparently, the owner of the company had bought the (empty) case from Cray after he watched two delivery guys drop it off the back of a loading dock. Unfortunately, at that time, the case had been quite full of Cray Goodness. Ouch.
In order to impress potential customers, he stuck it in his server room with a couple nice printers inside. Not a bad trick.
I'm currently running a server for my friends and relatives. We were a pretty tight knit group in high school, but now we're scattered all over the United States and New Zealand, going to school, traveling, working, etc. It's not a big group, only 25 or so people, but it works.
It's great -- we have forums, a web based instant messaging system, web mail, file archives, and a handful of domains for people's personal sites. It's really helped us stay in touch.
As far as funding goes, everyone chips in. The server is hosted at Rackspace, and between all the people involved it costs about $6 per month each, which is really affordable, even for us student types.
It's a very successful system, in my opinion. If anyone's curious about my experiences setting it up, or has any questions, send me an e-mail.