[PLUG] What do y'all want in your servers?

[Jeff Schwaber]

Hey PLUG,

FreeGeek has, for a while, sold cheap old equipment, refurbished to work but
slow by your new equipment standards. It's mostly been commodity desktop
hardware, now up to the 500Mhz range. Now we're looking at selling some of
the more obscure, arcane, and interesting workstation and server-class
equipment on a regular basis. Here's the problem: what do you all want? I'm
a part of the project to get this equipment back on the streets, back making
deals and digital trouble and I figure a good part of the demand for old
refurbished server hardware at low low prices is likely to come from, well,
geeks. So I'd like to ask you, pardon me for assuming you might be geeks,
what you'd be interested in if you were interested in buying a server at
maybe $50-200.

Here are a few of the questions I've thought of. Maybe you've even got more
questions?

Would you rather 10-20G IDE drives or 4-9G SCSI drives?
Would you rather pay a little extra and have RAID (probably software)
installed on the system when you get it?
Would you just like tested equipment, no drives, because you're happy with
an old processor but you're going to need to go out and get a 500 G drive to
hold all your music files?
Do you even care what OS is on it (we'd likely put Debian, Mandriva, or
Ubuntu on it)? Are you just going to wipe it the moment you get it?
What's your bottom end processor you'd consider? If it were dual?
Are there other specializations we should be considering to systems to make
them more appealing?


I'm going to try to follow the discussion, assuming there is one (please! I
want ideas!), but I also want to mention that if there's something specific
you're looking for and this makes you realize you want it, please at least
CC me directly to make sure I see it and can let you know if we can do it.

Thanks,

Jeff