[Babase] A babase project server at Duke

Karl O. Pinc babase@www.eco.princeton.edu
Wed, 10 Nov 2004 16:07:09 -0600


Hi Susan, et-al,

I had a long phone conversation with Hunter before lunch today.
He says the best way for him to support us is if we get
our own server, and I belive him.

He is loaning us a server temporarly until we figure out
what to do.  It sounds like something you will have to
deal with as soon as you return in Jan.

Our server is named: albertslab.biology.duke.edu

Hunter says he'll have it up by 6 tonight.

Which is great!  Should get us converted now and
carry us through to going live.

This means spending money.  We'll know more of
what our hardware requirements are as we get
the data converted, and then again as we try
out new programs.

If we spend less than $5000 we have to give an additional
50% to Duke (!), as the $5000 line determines
"capital expendature".  Hunter says he can come up
with something for as little as $1,200 (pre duke tax).
We also have to get maintenance from Dell on the
hardware.

An alternative would be to rent a managed computer from the
pros, something like this:

http://rimuhosting.com/index.jsp

They want ~$40/month for a (virtual) box with 256MB of RAM, which
likely is not enough, but we'll see.  For 512MB we'd pay $120/month,
which would likely take care of it, or $140/month for 576MB.
($20/month/60MB RAM)

This is probably worth it compared to $5,000, dunno.

On advantage of hosting at Duke is that Hunter will keep
up with security updates and, I suppose, even OS upgrades
and other stuff.  We'd have to automate that, which is easy,
but it's always nice to have a person looking after things.
Also, Hunter will deal with recovery should somebody break
into our computer.  The hosting company will only deal with
recovery from hardware failure.  Hunter has a better backup
system in that he keeps multiple days so if we destroy something
they'll be an old backup available to recover the data.
We would need to set something up to do this.  Not a big
deal, but Hunter already has.

Another alternative is re-purposeing some old computer
and running it ourselves.  (Hunter would not be involved.)
This is _not_ a good long-term solution but if there are
zero dollars available it would buy time.  We could keep
backups and it it probably would not break before we came
up with the money to replace it.

Right now we're running on a 1.8GHz Pentium 4 with 256MB
RAM and what looks like a 7200RPM ATA drive.

Karl <kop@meme.com>
Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
                   -- Robert A. Heinlein