Ron White wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-06-17 at 17:54 -0400, Jean-Paul natola wrote:
>>> VIA C6 MB @ US$ 70. Twin 80 to 500 GB WD SATA on ATACONTROL, GMIRROR, or
>>> SoftRAID are cheap. HK$ 1,300 1U case & PSU... typically 4 to 6 year component
>>> life - HDD included, fans excluded. IPFW or PF has all one needs for clever
>>> firewalling.
>>
>> I was thinking a box along these lines, they even look like the barracuda appliance
>>
>> http://www.asaservers.com/showpages.asp?pid=1291#
>>
>
> More like this: http://www.supermicro.com/index.cfm but I would
> personally warn against the 1 & 2u versions if they are going anywhere
> near people. They are so noisy you could think you are standing near a
> 747 taking off.
True for many years. But ... VIA (and ARM'ish or Atom), especially with 2.5" or
SSHD storage and fanless or with thermally speed-controlled fans, CAN be built
to be as cool and quiet as a Wintel laptop (though generally not as quiet as a
VIA or PPc laptop..)
> If it is going in a server room or data centre then it
> is ideal.
>
Noise aside, 3U and smaller rackmount case aspect ratios and weight, relative
'stiffness', or both are terribly inconvenient and too easily damaged for
anything BUT rackmount or a good facsimile thereof (wall-mount 'flat', perhaps).
> There are plenty of used Barracuda devices around out there but be
> warning buying used means you will never be able to get any support from
> Barracuda - or purchase updates. This is to protect their reseller
> network. However they still work fine and you can easily get into them
> and I imagine it would be fairly trivial to alter the scripts to update
> Spamassassin and ClamAV using their natural 'free' sources.
>
> Personally I've owned a number of Barracuda units over the last few
> years. They have some issues (which I won't details as this would be
> useful to spammers wanting to DoS them). I've long since ditched the
> hardware and put them onto Sun's excellent 'Virtual Box' (not a fan of
> VMWare) but I would love to be a good enough coder to produce something
> with Exim as an O/S project that did all the Barracuda could do, but for
> free.
>
With less-flexible MTA, one might need a Bagofrudenes front-end.
But IMNSHO, Exim is at its best when it is first AND last in the food-chain,
with no more than IPFW or PF as helpers.
Load-balance or failover two - or a whole a pool of 'em - if one must - but life
gets much hairier, myteries appear, machines fight or second-guess each other,
get out of sync - and admin workload goes up exponentially with any Tinker to
Evers to Chance chain of serial hand-offs
JM2CW,
Bill
