Au contriare, mon frere.
[Figured it was about time to change the subject line...]
Speaking of hardware design, I've got a few misc. questions and comments. These are geared towards building servers for remote use that are *not* routers, but rather light- to medium-load webservers and the like.
Does anyone know of a *small* rackmount case for PCs? By this I mean one that doesn't chew up quite so much vertical room as the usual boxes.
Yes, look in computer shopper. There are some short rack-mount PCs. I'm trying to get pricing on them now. And Crystal makes dream rackmounts; 4 across, 8 down in a 7' x 19" rack. But I suspect they're hideously expensive. They use passive backplanes :( They refused to even give me a price on just "how much for the case, power supply, backplane, and processor card w/ no cpu or memory"? I explained that we had to decide on a standard now for colo customers, that people walk in with 3' high tower cases and we go "nonononono". (Those that don't accept our advise and get Suns).
One of the annoying problems using an intel box instead of a sun is that there's no real console. If it dies, the only way to kick it remotely is with a remote-control power switch. These are expensive and unwieldy, not mounting nicely in racks.
I think I told you about these :) $500 or so from Black Box, 15 or 20amps across the whole switch, but it's code-activated and has 8 outlets. I guess you'd probably plug it into a terminal server port. I looked at x.10 systems, but 3 digits of security on the dtmf-parsing security does not cut it.
Lastly, I've seen this really neat rackmount chassis from Multitech. It's got 22 ISA slots, severable into up to 9 parts, and enough drive bays to actually run 9 separate servers. If you're looking for maximal density it seems like a good bet. The only problem I can see is that you'll need CPUs with both SCSI and viseo on board (thus my first question) unless you're willing to run on IDE drives. I figure that for light or medium-use servers, ethernet over ISA should be fine.
Roughly how much?
/a
Avi