I believe we are at the point where we can make this an official prayer request: Our new parish server will be the virtual church house.
The “building committee” has done some research and we figure the emphasis is on reliability, not flashy horsepower. The latter is okay, but we are mostly concerned that the machine have some fail-safe built into it. For techies, that means we are more interested in RAID and durability than lotsa CPU and RAM. It won’t do a lot of intensive computing, but what computing it does perform, it has to do 24/7 and we have to make it unlikely as possible that any trouble arise. It needs solid hardware far above a mere functional level.
Some of you probably know that installing Linux can turn any device into a server because of how Linux is structured, but we aren’t going to run this from my netbook because this poor thing would likely burn out before a month has passed under that kind of heavy workload. Worse, there is nothing to protect the contents if the single notebook drive starts failing.
If you can help us get one, that’s a real blessing. Otherwise, we have to come up with a minimum of around $300 just for the machine itself, never mind the peripherals (monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc.). That buys on eBay a minimal and old machine, so more is better, of course. I’m not a predatory fund raiser, but this is what we have found so far. God can use anything He likes, and anything He doesn’t like will fail, but we would be irresponsible if we didn’t do our homework based on the blessings of experience and expertise He’s already granted us. And if I’ve misstated things here, correct me, folks.
If you worry about me slavering over expensive toys, you wouldn’t be taking me serious in the first place. This is the vision I have and I’m all for keeping it modest. Were this just a cover for fulfilling my personal fantasies, I assure you it would require lotsa CPU cores, high speeds and terabytes of RAM with a gamer’s video card. And a few weeks later I’d be bored with playing on it and start installing other operating systems, etc. This is all about work; we want solid, not flash.
Update: And we have our first donation of $50 toward the server, thank you.
Update 2: Another donation for $300. This is getting serious, folks. It will be a few days yet as I learn to evaluate what constitutes suitable hardware. If you are adept at this, I’d be grateful for that kind of support, as well. I’m going to use as much as I receive for the tower and report back to you here once I have it in my possession.
