I just hit submit at Newegg.com to complete the purchase of a Tyan Transport GX28 server with a Tyan Thunder K8S Pro (S2882). As item number N82E16856152008 the barebones server was only $409.99, with $31.24 shipping. Thanks to a friend helping me out with some RAM and some disks which I’ll be able to make redundant I’ll likely end up with a 1U server with a pair of Opteron 800-series CPUs, 8GB of RAM, and mirrored 500GB SATA disks.
This all brings about an interesting question of where to host the new box. I’ve discussed this before, and the more I think about it the more I want to get my box out of Waveform. Things are working fine for now, but I question what will happen if or when the box does start to have problems. The provider I’m most seriously looking at would run $100/mo
So, now I just have to wait for things to be shipped and delivered and then I can start assembling it all. I imagine I’ll let it cook for a few weeks to a month before installing it. It’ll be running FreeBSD 7.0, likely with a custom kernel and world rebuilt specifically for the CPU. I think I’ll also want to give the new ULE scheduler a go, particularly after seeing this presentation (PDF) about where FreeBSD is going.
I’ll continue to stick with lighttpd, although I hope that the OpenSSL bug in 1.4.19 is fixed in ports soon. Disks will likely be mirrored with gmirror, although I will investigate the on-board hardware RAID. I’ll probably also stick with MySQL for the db and Postfix for mail. Basically, nothing will change in that regard.
I may opt to eliminate some individuals I currently host from the box, mostly because I never have contact with them. I don’t mind hosting people, but when the sites sit mostly unused and I have almost no contact with the individuals who use them (except when there are problems, of course), it’s a bit frustrating to keep up maintenance on apps running on the sites. Also, this new provider has stricter limits on bandwidth (1mb, 95th percentile), and I need to be a bit more careful about how it is used. Anyway, if I’m opting to remove your site from hosting I’ll contact you outside of here and provide you with a chance to get your data.
For now I wait, then build. This could be pretty nifty. Oh, and the colocation provider offers IPv6 at no extra charge, so that ought to be fun to play with as well.