[geeks] Exceedingly low-priced servers at geeks.com

[Lionel Peterson]

On Oct 31, 2009, at 12:29 PM, Bill Bradford <mrbill at mrbill.net> wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 06:28:04PM -0400, Lionel Peterson wrote:
>> Www.untangle.com
>> Do-all box for network protection:
>
> I thought about putting it on one of my Via C3-800 based thin  
> clients until
> I saw this:
>
> "We recommend at least a Pentium 4 Processor (or a similar AMD  
> Processor),
> 80 GB hard drive, 2 network cards, and 1 GB of memory."
>
> Holy crap.

What? The specs you cite are for sites with more than part-time users,  
and a system that far exceeds all above specifications (except HD  
capacity) can be had for about $109...

Were I on the Untangle team I'm not sure that I would push that hard  
for a PIII system in the requirements, those are systems (literally)  
from the last century...

An untangle box process all traffic several different ways before  
passing it on, how much lag in traffic speed would you tolerate to  
save $109?

In the education market (where I work), I trip over P4 systems  
everywhere I go, we made a point of pulling all PIII systems out of  
the schools a couple years ago. (Remember, many, many PIII systems are  
limited to 512 Meg of RAM, and that's not a happy place with IE7 and  
Office 2003 running...)

To paraphrase Dave McGuire, "systems don't get slower as they get  
older", but they also don't get faster either...

Lionel