Chris Cruft

When selecting the hardware platform for my brother Matt’s house, it was an easy call: a used Compaq ProLiant 3000. These servers are rock-solid (my Netware 4.2 server has been running for years on one), cheap and reasonably compatible (it seemed) with Linux. They support all kinds of redundancy (RAID, redundant power supplies and fans, ECC memory, etc.) and lights-out operations (extremely independent remote console, BIOS support for watchdog timers and headless operation, etc.). In a nutshell, you can’t beat them for cheap (~ $100 on eBay) and reliable. I bid and won my brother’s 3K today. It was a steal: for $100, I got four 36GB drives, a Compaq DLT tape drive, an array controller and an integrated management display. It is in the preferred tower format –as usual without the key. Eventually I will want to equip it with an Integrated Lights Out card and a second power supply before sending it to my brother’s house. It has two 333MHz processors –which under Linux should perform reasonably well in a home environment.