[vox] Just for fun...

[Don Werve]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 09:48:48PM -0700, Richard S. Crawford wrote:
> At home I have a computer that acts as a file/print/web/mail server.  It
> runs Red Hat 8, PHP, PostGreSQL, Apache 2, Samba, and so on, and so on. 
> The computer itself is an old 486 with 40GB of hard drive space and
> 128MB of RAM (both of which I plan on increasing soon).  The computer
> probably cost about $1200 when it was new, but now it's old and you
> probably wouldn't be able to buy its ilk at a store anymore (it was my
> wife's old computer).  But I imagine I could buy it pretty cheap from a
> friend or family member or used computer shop for less than $500.  Red
> Hat 8 cost me about $80.  Red Hat was pretty much ready to go once it
> was installed and all of the updates had been applied.  Cost of setup:
> less than $600. 

The server I'm running for my dad is a...er...hold on ('ssh foo.bar.com
cat /proc/cpuinfo')...dual PII/300MHz machine salvaged from various
scrap-piles.  It runs Apache, PHP, PostgreSQL, Samba, qmail, a virus
scanner, various spam-filtering tools, BIND, and...er...more.  The
machine was free, the hardware works great, and I can see this being
useful server hardware until well into the future.

Oh, speaking of useful hardware...anyone know of someone/someplace
offloading small (2-10G) SCSI2 drives for cheap/free?

> But just for giggles... how much would I have paid to set up an
> equivalent server on a Windows platform, including the ability to log in
> remotely and make adjustments (it's very easy to fix my Linux server
> right now with SSH), I wonder?

Well, to be fair, not as much as you might think; you could get by with
an older PII/400MHz running WinNT 4.x, with some commercial firewalling
software, VNC for remote administration, and the Cygnus libraries for
things like Apache, PHP, and PostgreSQL.  The overall cost would be
signifigantly higher, you'd have more downtime (likely), and it wouldn't
be as versatile, but the comparison is more valid than, say, what it
would take to purchase a *new* server capable of all of that from Dell.

Then again, if you were to go new-server-to-new-server, a new Linux box
is still loads cheaper than a new Windows box, not just because Linux
demands fewer resources, and not just because of the Microsoft tax, but
because of the incredible wealth of software which, while free on Linux,
is most certainly not free (as in beer) on Windows.  Things that us
Linux geeks take for granted, like iptables, tcpdump, snort, freeswan,
and afio.

-- 
Don Werve <donw@examen.com> (Unix System Administrator)

Yorn desh born, der ritt de gitt der gue,
Orn desh, dee born desh, de umn bork! bork! bork!