On Tue, 2004-06-01 at 11:13, Johnny Fulcrum wrote: > anybody have a super cool formula for figuring out the specs a linux box > should have for certain jobs? > > The recent "pop3 server recommendations thread" got me to thinking - if I > were to build a box that would be a email server for a group of 20 folks - > I probably would not drop by Walmart on my way into work and pick up a > $200 special... For a group of 20, anything you could possibly buy new these days is likely way more than enough. You'd only need better of you get into the range of maybe tens of thousands of users, or a really really big database... The real issue is reliability. A reasonable quality $600-$1000 desktop is probably fine for most small business. Backup to tape or a second hard drive. If you keep parts handy it should only require an hour or two to swap a fried disk, power supply, or motherboard... A $200 Walmart special is questionable, in that price range the motherboards tend to be rather low quality, as well as the power supplies... Its only when your customer needs absolute 100% uptime that you need to get into hotswappable RAID, hotswappable redundant power supplies... _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list