I should have anticipated a lot of folks would be pushing AWS or Rackspace
or something off-site.

At my last job in San Jose I would have *loved* to have outsourced all of
this because of the complications working with both city and University IT
and network.
I would have loved to have kissed those Windows servers goodbye and brushed
up on my Linux and had the 24 hour support and zero downtime guarantee that
came with such a solution.

In Chattanooga, the situation is different.

We've got the 1 gig connection, and it is a big piece of this wonderful
city's identity.  I definitely don't know enough about network architecture
to speak meaningfully about it, but we are moving from an antiquated setup
to the fastest public internet in the country.  It's pretty cool.  I don't
think outsourcing is really part of that plan, you know?  I'm really
looking forward to engaging the local geek community in creating local
solutions.

I do imagine that in the future as we do one-off apps we'll experiment with
AWS.  For now, I'm awfully excited to set up some hardware, have control of
that hardware (that cannot be taken for granted in public libraries) and do
some tinkering.

Yes... I do need more than just a production server, but I've got some
reconditioned boxes coming from the city that I can play with for testing
and staging (for now).

For now, this server is going to run/host a Drupal website for the library.

Please, anybody, do speak up if you think my approach is flawed...

N

On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 8:43 PM, Ross Singer <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> This answer segues well into my question: why, exactly, do you want a
> physical server?
>
> I realize that there are plenty arguments for running your own hardware
> (and bandwidth is cheap and plentiful in Chattanooga -- which deals with
> the main carrying cost), but, presumably you'll need more than one (for
> replication and whatnot), right?
>
> What exactly do you plan to run/host on this server?
>
> -Ross.
>
> On Monday, July 16, 2012, Cary Gordon wrote:
>
> > We currently use Dell in our datacenter, but we are moving almost all
> > of our servers to AWS over the next 10 months.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Cary
> >
> > On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 11:52 AM, Nate Hill <[log in to unmask]
> <javascript:;>>
> > wrote:
> > > I'm shopping for a new dedicated server for our public library website.
> > > I'd like to run Ubuntu.
> > > Does anyone have any hardware suggestions/guidance they'd like to
> offer?
> > > I'd like to not spend a zillion dollars.
> > > Thanks-
> > >
> > > --
> > > Nate Hill
> > > [log in to unmask] <javascript:;>
> > > http://www.natehill.net
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Cary Gordon
> > The Cherry Hill Company
> > http://chillco.com
> >
>



-- 
Nate Hill
[log in to unmask]
http://www.natehill.net