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Hardware upgrades needed |
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The popularity of aprsworld has been growing with leaps and bounds recently. I'm starting to hear from more and more users around the world and I'm seeing the hits jump.
maps.aprsworld.net is supplying the vast majority of the maps for findu and the APRS community. It works out that maps is serving about 3 million maps per month. Maps is an old Pentium III 600MHz machine. It is running at full load (load average well above 1 usually) 24/7. Ideally it should be a fast dual CPU machine with two gigabytes of memory and RAID-5 disks.
db.aprsworld.net is also getting quite a lot of load considering it is a 3 year old 1GHz Athlon. Usually the CPU isn't a limiting factor, instead the disk is. But both could use some modernization.
Last year with the help of generous donors I was able to purchase two 73 gigabyte ultra 160 SCSI drives and an Ultra160 hardware RAID controller. Unfortunately one of the drives died after about 4 months and the performance dropped dramatically while the RAID controller was trying to reconcile the damaged disk with the good disk. So right now the RAID array and controller are offline and the machine is running on a 14 gigabyte IDE drive, a 20 gigabyte IDE drive, and a 36 gigabyte Ultra160 SCSI drive for the database. Very much unoptimal hardware.
To bring db.aprsworld.net up to acceptable standards it also would need to be upgraded to a dual CPU machine with multiple gigabytes of memory and RAID-5 storage. With new drives the Adapatec 2100S SCSI control could be put back into use, but that is probably the only hardware that could be kept.
I don't have a concrete proposal systems at all. And I don't really have time to shop hardware and find the best deal. I'm hoping that somebody familar with current hardware could do shopping, work with me, and propose the new hardware.
Or you can send a me cash, check, money order, or whatever to:
If you are interesting in donating hardware, please contact Jim KB0THN.