[Discuss] BLU server

[abreauj at gmail.com (John Abreau)]

The service we have now is grandfathered in from 25 years ago at $1 per
month, with a contract that survives when the company is sold or merged
with another company. We own our rack and all our equipment; the data
center provides the electricity and bandwidth.

They're just closing down their datacenter in Marlboro, and it looks like
they will be relocating our rack and everything in it to their Waltham
location, and the service will remain $1 per month. Jerry is coordinating
the details.

Our main expenses are replacing the servers as they age with newer hardware
we find on ebay, and occasionally replacing a failing drive before the
second drive in the mirror pair fails.

On Sat, Jan 11, 2025 at 2:36?PM Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> wrote:

> On 1/11/25 11:04 AM, Zachary Liebl wrote:
> > I am not sure what else you have running on your server, but assuming it
> is just simple stuff like webservers and mailservers then you would be fine
> condensing it onto a mini PC. They even have Raspberry Pi colocation for
> $9/month which is probably enough. Of course they also have standard 1U,
> 2U, etc hosting.
>
> Very interesting.
>
>
> The Raspberry Pi hosting is very intriguing, if only Pis were better.
>
> I consider SD cards to be in a category similar to how I used to think
> of floppies. Terribly useful, nice to fall back on for booting, etc.,
> but I don't trust *running* off an SD card. A Raspberry Pi 4 is willing
> to boot off of external devices! But even if I plug a Raspberry Pi into
> a big fat power supply the built in USB ports can't supply enough power
> for external disks or SSDs. Grrrr.
>
> So I have a powered hub, a pair of raid 1 SSDs each in Sabrent USB
> enclosures, two power supplies (one for the Pi, one for the hub), and
> the Raspberry Pi 4, in a metal case that doubles as a heatsink.
>
> Not a powerful machine circa 2025, but in many ways much more powerful
> than the Cray-1 super computers of my youth. Good enough for me.
>
> I wonder if their "mini PC" colocation would allow "Please set this heap
> of stuff on a shelf, plug in power and ethernet. Oh, and replug any of
> the other connections that came apart in shipping."? Not that I would be
> in the market right now for that service, but still good to have
> strawman options around.
>
>
> -kb, the Kent whose two mail servers are a "heap of stuff", but at least
> with no moving parts.
>
>
> P.S. I wish Raspberry Pis were a bit more productized. I wish the
> Raspberry Pi 5's being high power meant things like more DC current
> instead of meaning too much heat to run without moving parts (fans).
>
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-- 
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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