New System Hardware

During the HCoop IRC meeting on June 24, 2006, the group decided that it would based it's new system architecture on the following pieces of hardware:

• Two robust servers, one that doesn't allow normal user logins, and one that does.
• One switch to form a LAN between these servers.
• One serial port device, to facilitate remote access to our servers.

Also, it was mentioned that we should research hardware support contracts from any vendor that will be selling us equipment.

Additionally, group decided that the server that HCoop currently owns, Abulafia, will be brought to he.net for shell service. This will follow a necessary re-load of the OS software at a time to be determined later.

This page will serve as a forum for collaborative research on the pieces of hardware that we need.

Servers

We will be purchasing two servers, which will be configured and sent to he.net for colocation.

Server Hardware Specifications

These servers should be as redundant as possible. At this point, we cannot afford to have less than one point of failure in many areas, so we should look for the following features in our new servers:

• Redundant power supplies.
• Hardware RAID.
• Dual CPU's, AMD seems to be a stronger option than Intel

Server Hardware Vendors

Ethernet Switch

Switch Hardware Specifications

Switch Hardware Vendors

Serial Port

Docelic, or other users -- please update this section since I am entirely ignorant about these devices!

Serial Port Specifications

Serial Port Vendors

[http://www.cyclades.com/ Cyclades] was mentioned as one vendor of serial port devices which are linux-friendly.