We recently started purchasing a handful of the first opteron based server in Dell’s line, the PowerEdge SC1435. An upgrade to the previous 1425, this server came on our radar due to a significant array of improvements:

Full Spec sheet: http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/sc1435_specs.pdf

2 Socket Opteron 2xxx
8 Memory slots (Maximum 32GB DDR2 667Mhz)
Hardware RAID controller (entry level card)
SATAII (Maximum 2x750GB) or SAS drives (Maximum 2x300GB 15K)
Onboard Dual Broadcom GigE NICs or PCIe Dual Intel 1000PT NICs

Not to be confused with a mid-range server, this entry level build throws quite a punch at incredibly competitive price points.

This server is designed for web serving and HPCC, we’ve found success both in web serving and Xen virtualization to date. Disk IO performance is adequately sub-par, but this is not the system you would buy to power a high reliability mysql or NFS server.

What is this server missing? Hot swappable disks and redundant dual power supplies. But as I said, this is an entry level box at an entry level price point. Step into the mid-range 1950/2950 for these added components and improved disk IO.

CentOS 5 is a cloned version of the Red Hat Enterprise 5 Advanced Platform.

- No limit on CPU sockets
- No limit on virtualized guests
- Includes storage virtualization and cluster suite support

CentOS is the ideal platform for organizations which do not require technical support from the north american vendor otherwise referred to as Red Hat, Inc.

Don’t misconstrue my comments, Red Hat is a fine organization. They are a well fit glove and finely tuned machine for medium and large businesses which require certain levels of infrastructure and platform support, and which can also afford hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in system licensing.

My main interest in the RHEL/CentOS 5 releases was a production ready Xen environment, stabilized for the hardware platforms we run on. To date we’ve been utilizing Fedora Core 5 in conjunction with Xen 3.0 which has put our organization in a handful of technically precarious positions on more than one occasion, requiring quick troubleshooting and retroactive/proactive patching.

Initial reactions to Xen on CentOS 5 have been nothing short of stellar. Aside from some initial driver related problems with our Dell hardware raid controllers and the file system builds within guest images, the performance and stability provided by CentOS5 guests have been well improved over our experiences with FC/Xen.

One of my favorite past times involves installing different operating systems with a small, yet very real chance that I may switch to that OS for a desktop environment.

Tooling around isn’t as much fun these days when we have a network of over 50 very powerful servers, many of them Virtualized environments allowing anyone on our team to toy at will.

I’ve never had the chance to experience Debian, and while my wife and I had an evening of Law and Orders in the TV room I grabbed the netinstaller ISO for Debian 4.0 and went at it.

The ISO was approximately 150MB in size, parallels picked it right up, and I had Debian running in under 30 minutes. The installer was a breeze and the desktop environment reminded me of the good old days when the linux desktop was my primary choice. It still seems to have that rough around the edges slash are those fonts anti aliasing or do they just look bad, initial appearance…

It doesn’t seem to mind running as a 256MB VM, and hopefully I’ll have some time in the weeks ahead to delve into the UI further.

The order sits in queue, $239.40.

Reverse IP address is for a server at a competing web host. A simple glance from anyone in our organization yields a click of the delete button as this order is clearly fraudulent. Not just the reverse lookup, viet-server.com as the domain name and a questionable free email account gives us a 99.99% probability of fraudulent activity.

As a web host, how can we quantify this derelict behavior?

The google adword click cost roughly $4.00. Is that our total cost of dealing with fraudulent business?

What about the rare exceptions that slip through the cracks? The fraudster has used a proxified IP address in the same city as the card holder, has gone above and beyond to slide through the cracks of virtual, yet very real theft.

In our business it is $15.00 per chargeback plus the monies received. It is also the temporary yet devastating impact those very rare excecptions can have if allowed onto our shared network.

In retrospect, the pains suffered by the merchant pale in comparison to those of the cardholder who must salvage their money and credit ratings, where identify theft has occured.