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Grex > Coop13 > #380: Cyberspace Communications finances for November 2006 | |
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| Author |
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| 25 new of 124 responses total. |
maus
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response 58 of 124:
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Dec 19 16:31 UTC 2006 |
After more reading, it appears that the hit we would take on computing
parity and writing parity would be offset by parallelizing seeking. Does
anyone have numbers for this? Is a RAID 5 with one hot spare
sufficiently reliable for us?
Also, I realized I made a big assumption. Does our chassis have physical
space for a drive cage that is the height of 3 CDRom drives and 5.25"
wide?
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maus
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response 59 of 124:
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Dec 19 16:40 UTC 2006 |
Just wondering, since this has a decidedly technical side to it and is a
discussion of hardware for Grexserver, should this item be moved/linked
into Agorage conference?
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remmers
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response 60 of 124:
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Dec 19 17:17 UTC 2006 |
Probably the Garage conference, which is specifically for public
discussions of Grex technical issues. I think the fairwitness there
is janc, so he'd be the person to link it.
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maus
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response 61 of 124:
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Dec 19 17:25 UTC 2006 |
I have a rough draft of the RFQ ready for staff and board to look over.
It has a couple of spaces that need to be filled in (the contact person
and the due date). Comments, criticisms, thoughts, etc are encouraged.
=========================================================================
=
Introduction:
Cyberspace Communications, Inc. (Grex) is a nonprofit organization
dedicated to the advancement of public education and scientific endeavor
through interaction with computers, and humans via computers, using
computer conferencing. Further purposes include the exchange of
scientific and technical information about the various aspects of
computer science, such as operating systems, computer networks, and
computer programming. Cyberspace Communications is investigating
increasing their conferencing server's capacity, capabilities and
reliability by adding a new drive array.
Instructions:
Please provide an anticipated and a maximum quote. Specifications are
firm, and bidders are not to deviate from the specification without
prior written approval from Cyberspace Communications. Quantities are
firm. No under-runs. Cyberspace Communications will retain units over
the specified quantity and will not pay for over-runs.
Award Criteria:
Consideration will be given to price, warranty terms, responsibility,
delivery time, delivery terms and experience in performance of similar
deals.
Contact For Specification:
********@cyberspace.org
Alternates/Substitutes:
Alternate bids of substantially the same quality, style and features are
invited. In order to receive full consideration, such alternate bids
must be accompanied by sufficient descriptive literature and/or
specifications to clearly identify the offer and allow for a complete
evaluation.
Acceptance of Bids:
Any bid may be rejected as non-responsive in the judgment of Cyberspace
Communications should any of the following occur: Material alteration or
erasure of the RFP/RFQ documents; Failure to submit required bid
guaranty (when required); Failure to furnish requested pricing or other
information; Submission of a late bid. In addition, bids may be rejected
for any other justifiable reason including, but not limited to, failure
to perform on previous contracts with Cyberspace Communications.
Withdrawl of Bids:
Bids may be withdrawn or modified upon written request from the properly
identified bidder, prior to the date and hour scheduled for the closing
of bids.
Receipt of Quotes:
Responses to this RFQ should be emailed to ********@cyberspace.org by
********** at noon, Eastern Time.
Item Quantity Description
0 1 3Ware 9550SX-4LP: PCI-X 4 port Serial ATA RAID
controller board 1 1 3Ware RDC-400: Serial ATA RAID
Drive Cage 2 4 Seagate Barracuda ES 200 GByte Serial
ATA Drives
*OR*
2 4 Maxtor DiamondMAX 10 200 GByte Serial ATA Drives
3 4 3Ware Cables for 9590SE, 9550SX and 3ware
Sidecar
Earliest Delivery Date (after receipt of order): ____________________
Shipping Charges: INCLUDED_______EXTRA_______ COST________
Method of Shipping: _________________________________________________
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mcnally
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response 62 of 124:
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Dec 19 18:16 UTC 2006 |
Is the "SATA RAID Drive Cage" an external SATA enclosure, or does
"drive cage" in this parlance mean a sled that fits into another
enclosure? In other words, will these drives be in a separate
box or inside the main system unit? Either way, what other cabling
is necessary?
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maus
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response 63 of 124:
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Dec 19 18:58 UTC 2006 |
It is a metal box that sits inside the front of the server chassis, in
the same place where one would normally put internal CDRom drives or
tape drives. It has four slots in it, and you slide the drives (on
trays) into those slots. You can see hte photograph for it at
http://3ware.com/products/ata.asp.
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mary
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response 64 of 124:
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Dec 19 20:53 UTC 2006 |
Do we want to invest any money in non-rack mounted hardware?
If we ever wanted to move to another location we'd pretty much
need to fit in standard rack space.
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nharmon
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response 65 of 124:
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Dec 19 21:28 UTC 2006 |
This is an internal drive array, Mary.
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keesan
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response 66 of 124:
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Dec 19 21:42 UTC 2006 |
I think we should fix the mail problem before investing in more hardware, and
put back newuser. Why spend money on grex if it is going to evaporate?
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mcnally
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response 67 of 124:
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Dec 19 22:09 UTC 2006 |
re #65: If it's built to fit into a tower case it's almost certainly
not going to fit into a rack-mount chassis.
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maus
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response 68 of 124:
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Dec 20 00:41 UTC 2006 |
If the rack case can accommodate 3 CDRom drives (all the ones 3U or
taller that I have seen can), then this will fit just fine. Technically,
we could get by with mounting the drives directly in drive slots in the
chassis, but then we would lose hot-plug capabilities. It ill fit into
any case that has three adjacent externally accessible 5.25 inch drive
bays (so a space 4.8 inches by 5.25 inches approximately).
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maus
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response 69 of 124:
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Dec 20 00:52 UTC 2006 |
resp:66 Keesan, I think the storage issue is orthogonal to the spam
issue, and in some ways, I think the additional space would help, since
if we moved /var and our equivalent of /home onto the new drives, they
would not fill up as easily, thereby preventing the potential DOS from
overflowing /var.
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keesan
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response 70 of 124:
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Dec 20 01:39 UTC 2006 |
Why not just prevent the spam from coming in instead of finding a place to
store it? Or at least get rid of all unused accounts, to start with.
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mcnally
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response 71 of 124:
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Dec 20 02:08 UTC 2006 |
re #70:
> Why not just prevent the spam from coming in instead of finding
> a place to store it?
We've answered this question time and time and time again -- why should
you expect us to answer it again just because you don't like the answers?
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nharmon
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response 72 of 124:
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Dec 20 03:40 UTC 2006 |
> If it's built to fit into a tower case it's almost certainly not going
> to fit into a rack-mount chassis.
If we moved to a rack mountable chassis, we would have to get one that
had enough 5.25" bays for the drive array. I have no experience with
putting PC hardware into a rack mountable chassis, so I would defer to
maus's expertise.
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maus
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response 73 of 124:
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Dec 20 06:19 UTC 2006 |
Most 3U and 4U chassis will accommodate this drive cage. If we want to
skip the cage and just put the drives directly into the server chassis
in the internal 3.5 inch slots, we can, but I recommend against doing
so, since we would lose hot-plug capabilities, and because the cage is
designed with the thermal characteristics of four drives in mind and
mitigates or dissipates the heat generated by running the four drives.
If we can give up hot-plug and if we want to do some air-flow
engineering of our own then go ahead and skip the cage, just make sure
that thermal damage does not void the warranty of the drives.
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maus
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response 74 of 124:
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Dec 20 06:26 UTC 2006 |
Keesan, I agree that something needs to be done about the spam, but a
total 100% solution is probably not feasible, and the problem of spam
does not negate the fact that we need reliable, capacious storage.
If negating spam is your top priority, perhaps you could donate
something like
http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/products/spam_overview.php for Grex
to use.
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spooked
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response 75 of 124:
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Dec 20 12:02 UTC 2006 |
*MANY* solutions exist today, before-your-eyes on the Internet which could
easily catch 95%+ of incoming spam into the Grex mail server. They could
be implemented quickly by any staff member with half-a-degree of
intelligence.
Unfortunately, Grex is so backward and naive (did I mention
anti-progressionary?) that it (in particular its staff) will find any
excuse not to move forward from its ancient software and system
architecture base.
So glad I resigned from those cronies.
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nharmon
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response 76 of 124:
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Dec 20 13:01 UTC 2006 |
You don't seem glad.
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spooked
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response 77 of 124:
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Dec 20 13:11 UTC 2006 |
*giggles* Thanks for the light amusement :)
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mary
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response 78 of 124:
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Dec 20 13:22 UTC 2006 |
The reason I bring up the rack-mount issue is I believe we'll
someday need to fit into the smallest space possible at some
other location than Provide. When we moved from the Pumpkin,
to Provide, we were very lucky Provide had the space and inclination
to allow our hardware to occupy a footprint outside of their racks.
Every other affordable ISP I contacted wanted us in a rack and charged
for service based on the amount of rack space (and bandwidth) used.
I would really like to see space considerations made part of any
hardware decisions we make at this point. So, thanks for all
the information on this.
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ric
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response 79 of 124:
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Dec 20 13:34 UTC 2006 |
I don't know of any spam fighting systems that are easily implemented thta
actually eliminate 95% of spam without also blocking desired email.
Even greylisting, and using all sort of DNS blacklists, does *NOT* reduce my
spam intake by 95% on my server, and I even use some mroe aggresive DNS
blacklists like spamcop.
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nharmon
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response 80 of 124:
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Dec 20 14:00 UTC 2006 |
I understand and appreciate the need to keep our physical footprint as
small as possible. If we needed to put Grex into a rack mountable case
right now, we would need one that was at least 3U to accommodate the PC
components that were used to build Grex (Rack space is measured in U's,
with each U being about 1.75 inches).
http://www.directron.com/ra349c00300w.html
This is a 3U rack chassis that would accommodate Grex's present
motherboard and cards as well as two of the drive cages that maus is
proposing.
If we wanted to venture into 2U or 1U territory we would be looking at a
complete system repurchase, and we might even have to get 2.5" (read:
laptop) hard drives in the case of a 1U solution. And laptop hard drives
are NOT cheap, nor as reliable, nor as spacious, as 3.5" drives.
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maus
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response 81 of 124:
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Dec 20 20:22 UTC 2006 |
I like that chassis you showed. And anything smaller than 3U would
require a reengineering. Laptop hard drives are not standard for a 1U
chassis, but you would be limited to two or three normal-sized drives,
which means putting all of our eggs into one basket (in performance as
well as redundancy). If we only had 2U of space, what we could do is put
just our system drives into the host and data drives into a separate
drive shelf.
An alternate solution might be to find out if our ISP offers a managed
SAN option. in this case, we would simply pay the monthly fee instead of
amortizing out a the cost of installing this storage equipment
ourselves. At worst, we would have to buy a gigabit NIC and an initiator
programme (though I have heard that the initiator programme from NetBSD
can be ported to OpenBSD with little work).
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aruba
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response 82 of 124:
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Dec 20 23:15 UTC 2006 |
maus - thanks a lot for your work on this. Your RFQ looks very
professional. I just want to make sure it doesn't commit us to anything,
if we get a bid. Going forward with a RAID array will require some time to
get the board and staff on board, so I don't want you to be annoyed if we
get a quote and then sit on it for a while. I hope we'll discuss it in
depth soon, but the process of agreeing on what we want and then the
logistics of the changeover may be much more elaborate than the actual
purchase.
Here is Grex's current case:
http://www.antec.com/pdf/drawings/PLUS1080AMG.pdf
It has room for 8 5.25 drives. I tend to agree with Mary, though, that we
should think in terms of rack mounting in the future.
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