PEQ is down again ??

[gaeorn]

Originally Posted by rup1033

So far I have only donated 10$ towards the PEQ project but I'm poor and have no job at the moment, if I was working I'd totally drop 100 bucks without a thought if it would help make us not disconnect often.

Now the idea of getting a server could be done if every person who plays donates 10 to 100$ you could build a new machine. Perhaps have a thermometer or a donation counter on the server homepage to show how finances are at the time.

A new server PC of 4,000 dollars like I saw mentioned earlier I think is way too much overkill for a small project that is funded from donations and your own pocketbook. You can build a reasonably priced high end desktop PC with a quad core CPU and 8gig of ram and a good quality motherboard , 7200rpm enterprise grade disks with synced spindle speed in raid 1+0 (4 disks with one spare not in the computer so if one fails of a set you can RMA, and rebuild the array with the spare and keep server going), or a raid 5 solution if that's your preference. Don't go too skimpy on the raid card for sure.

IF you were to go with a desktop CPU like an Athlon II x4 3ghz without the shared L3 cache like Phenom or Opteron it would probably look something like
500$ for mainboard chip, and 8gig of corsair xms seris performance ram maybee 100$ for a kvm ip pci card or usb SecureLinx Spider kvm over ip then a raid card ~290$
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...scrollFullInfo , A thermaltake TPG-750M 87% efficent gold certified 750W psu 180$.
A good place to get a enclosure for it would be http://www.servercase.com/Merchant2/...Code=AdvServer I purchased one of their entry level server cases, for what I believe was 89$ after shipping, solid steel with 8 drive bays 5.25" and one 3.5". Fits my 12x13 extended atx opteron board.
So around 1300-1400$ doing it that route without having purchased the hard disks.
For drives I don't know about the newer velociraptors. I hear the failure rate is pretty high, but my older original raptor disks have been running all day and night and getting beat on for a few years now and are doing well. Perhaps a cheaper 7200rpm disk set for the raid would be best, as long as they have synchronized spindle speed, avoid western digital RE disks I hear they have a horrible failure rate according to newegg reviews. If you really wanted I suppose you could step it up to Serial Attached SCSI the disks in that category are built like a tank generally which I'm sure you know. Their cost is quite a bit more.

That's just my 2cp worth, just making a few suggestions on a sub 2000$ machine. Maybe such a idea cant work out for you but I was bored and sat and wrote it. And I'm sure someone is bored and sat and read it and may have ideas of their own to post.

We can always go cheaper. The whole point of this plan is to NOT go the cheapest route. As was stated by CD in another thread, I will be providing a the co-lo to put this equipment at my expense. In exchange, I will be running a virtual host on this equipment. Currently, I have that virtual machine running on one of two physical machines so I can move it to the other in the event of a hardware failure. I am not going to give up that redundancy for my own set up. This means it has to be two machines. I do not have the IP space for additional machines without an additional fee per month, which is also not going to happen.

My existing machines do not have the disk IO ability to handle PEQ. They might be a bit light on CPU as well, but it is possible that both could be used in tandem for PEQ if the disk IO problem were addressed. That would require a caching raid card.

The raid cards in our proposal are about $800 each. Sure, we could go cheaper, but then we would not have as much expandability in the future. These raid cards come with 512MB cache memory and are expandable to 4GB cache memory. They optionally have a battery that can be connected to them, which allows the safe use of write caching.

People seem to think that adding more drives in a RAID array always resolves disk IO problems. Just like networking, there are two values to pay attention to with disk IO: throughput and latency. Adding drives improves throughput but does not help latency, and in fact can even hurt latency. Higher spindle speeds and seek times improve latency. Read caching can help some as well if the predictive read ahead logic is good. Write caching can help quite a bit as it allows you to optimize writes to reduce the number of seeks required.

The systems we proposed will have a pair of 147GB 15krpm SAS drives in each. Short of enterprise class SSDs, this is the best we can do. Consumer class SSDs do not have the performance or the reliability we need.

The systems we are getting will be expandable to up to two 6 core xeons and up to 48GB ram. It is currently the cheapest option that I could find that has built in management and the expandability we desired. There are other options up to motherboards that could take up to two 12 core opterons and 256GB ram, but that costs even more than what we already proposed.

Also the suggestion in the quote above does not include any way to power cycle or reset the system. This is a feature that you generally get with more expensive server class motherboards. My current systems have this as well as the ones that are in the proposed setup for PEQ.

Here is the list of components proposed: http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/Pu...umber=10972134

If you look at the bottom of that list, the subtotal is $4,156.74. Then you have to add for tax and shipping. That comes to $4,587.64. And don't forget that the money we are raising has PayPal fees taken out of it. So this is not a cheap endeavor. But it should be a long term solution, allowing for failures, both software and hardware, and allowing for quite a lot of relatively inexpensive upgrades later if more horsepower is needed.

[Quellren]

Originally Posted by gaeorn

That comes to $4,587.64. And don't forget that the money we are raising has PayPal fees taken out of it.

It doesn't have to. There are no fees when donating money, provided you:
1) use the 'personal' tab when sending money. Label the transaction as a 'gift', 'other', or 'cash advance'. The other two options 'living expenses' and 'payment owed' won't have the paypal fees deducted but somehow don't seem to fit. This is, after all, a DONATION, not a PURCHASE.
the only other thing is:
2) pay for it with a paypal balance, or a validated bank acct. if you use a credit card or debit card there is a fee, I believe it's smaller, but still a fee.

This isn't shady, underhanded, or 'secret-squirrel'. You are making a donation. Not a purchase. Read the paypal site and stop wasting money.

[IamITdude]

Wowsie, just browsed that list of components. You're sure going for redundancy upon redundancy. Seems a solid plan, although I wonder if it wouldn't be cheaper to just go mid-range setup and then simply upgrade mid-range again in a year or two. The logistics of that might be a shit storm in itself though.

You say you're going to be running two of thoose bad boys? I hope you've got enough wall amps at your hosting provider to run two huge guzzlers at peak(ing) capacity. Back of the envelope calculation, they are going to be sucking up what 7, 8 amps? I host my servers in a shared co-lo which puts a severe limit on how much juice my servers can suck up without me paying extra.

But given you're proposing this I guess you've considered this.

[gaeorn]

Originally Posted by IamITdude

Wowsie, just browsed that list of components. You're sure going for redundancy upon redundancy. Seems a solid plan, although I wonder if it wouldn't be cheaper to just go mid-range setup and then simply upgrade mid-range again in a year or two. The logistics of that might be a shit storm in itself though.

You say you're going to be running two of thoose bad boys? I hope you've got enough wall amps at your hosting provider to run two huge guzzlers at peak(ing) capacity. Back of the envelope calculation, they are going to be sucking up what 7, 8 amps? I host my servers in a shared co-lo which puts a severe limit on how much juice my servers can suck up without me paying extra.

But given you're proposing this I guess you've considered this.

We have sufficient power for peak needs, although if it ran at peak all the time, then we did not pick out the right equipment based on what we are shooting for. My estimated average will be around 2 amps per system. Remember, that is an average, with lower power draw during the off hours.

[badplayer]

I've never used "enterprise" raid. What do $800 raid cards do that intel chipset raid doesn't do? Isn't the bottleneck the hard drives and not the chipset??? Even with an old ICH8R, two super fastSSD doesn't bottleneck it and these mechanical drivers are way slower.

[Itchybottom]

Originally Posted by badplayer

I've never used "enterprise" raid. What do $800 raid cards do that intel chipset raid doesn't do? Isn't the bottleneck the hard drives and not the chipset??? Even with an old ICH8R, two super fastSSD doesn't bottleneck it and these mechanical drivers are way slower.

Battery backed cache, and in most cases better cross-platform driver compatibility because companies like Areca have product lines that aren't as wide spread as a systems integrator.

[badplayer]

Originally Posted by Itchybottom

Battery backed cache, and in most cases better cross-platform driver compatibility because companies like Areca have product lines that aren't as wide spread as a systems integrator.

Why in the world would that be needed for a EQ server? Those two raid cards take the price from relatively easy to do, to crazy expensive. $2400 vs $4000.

I can't even imagine a situation where you would need such a thing as opposed to a plain old UPS at 1/10th the cost. That's something a giant corporation like VISA would buy for redundancy in credit card transactions. I would imagine most etailers, unless you're the size of newegg, don't even have one. This is madness.

[TheDonkey]

[sorvani]

Originally Posted by badplayer

Why in the world would that be needed for a EQ server? Those two raid cards take the price from relatively easy to do, to crazy expensive. $2400 vs $4000.

I can't even imagine a situation where you would need such a thing as opposed to a plain old UPS at 1/10th the cost. That's something a giant corporation like VISA would buy for redundancy in credit card transactions. I would imagine most etailers, unless you're the size of newegg, don't even have one. This is madness.

I can telly you that you would be wrong there. I recommend similar equipment to every single client when purchasing servers for their small and medium businesses. Giant megacorp has 2 or three sets of redundant servers. SMB has a single server with hot swap components and 4 hour service contracts with their vendors. A SMB can't afford multiples (well say they can't), but they hurt far worse than megacorp when their system goes down.

[KalikaMojeska]

Me and my hubby started back to EQ just this last month after MANY years of being being gone and recently even made it to LV 20 woo hoo . After trying a few different servers we felt we found a home on PEQ. Everyone has been so friendly, especially with my sometimes NOOB questions and helpful like giving me buffs so I could get my levels back before my hubby got home and found out how dumb I really was when I fell though the tree in BB and lost 3 levels just doing a corpse run b/c I was lost LOL.

I know my hubby already told me he will be giving a donation this month...not sure if it will be $25 or $100 (we have 2 little kids 4yrs and 9months) it will depend on bills this month I am guessing. Hopefully no matter what it is it will be helpful.

Thank you guys for your hard work, and while we are sad PEQ is down we anxiously wait for it to come back up. Doesn't matter if it's one day or four days will we will be back when you are

Babes

[unykron]

I think some of these peeps should take a chill pill and be patient for several reasons.

1- Its free so as much as you wanna get ticked cause you cant play always remember...it's free.

2 - Dont bitch about what setup they wanna use....it's their servers when they get the money it will all be all right again..until then qwitchabitchin.


3 - refer to 1 and 2 and if you still cant seem to get it, grab a roll of duct tape and super glue and glue the tape to your lips.

as for donations, yes I havent made one yet im still catching up my bills but I will make one of many. as for the rest quit bitchin about the donations for somthing that is free for you to play.

If you dont trust them enough to help out and make our server run with perfection then maybe you shouldnt be taking advantage of the free part and then put your 2 cents in like as if you been paying monthly for 3 years

[gaeorn]

Originally Posted by Quellren

It doesn't have to. There are no fees when donating money, provided you:
1) use the 'personal' tab when sending money. Label the transaction as a 'gift', 'other', or 'cash advance'. The other two options 'living expenses' and 'payment owed' won't have the paypal fees deducted but somehow don't seem to fit. This is, after all, a DONATION, not a PURCHASE.
the only other thing is:
2) pay for it with a paypal balance, or a validated bank acct. if you use a credit card or debit card there is a fee, I believe it's smaller, but still a fee.

This isn't shady, underhanded, or 'secret-squirrel'. You are making a donation. Not a purchase. Read the paypal site and stop wasting money.

Unfortunately, most donate via credit card. But yes, for those who do not, they can use the option you state.