Recently we announced a new DIY project: build a web server for charity. The idea is simple, STH gives two users up to $200 to scour the STH forums, ebay, craigslist, local swap meets and etc. in order to build a great value server. The server build will be documented by the two individuals. After the build is complete, each user will then donate the web server to charity after a little bit of benchmark action. Goals are really twofold: first to donate some hardware to a charity in need. Second to have a bit of fun bargain hunting and doing a low cost web server build. Today we have two participants who signaled their willingness to participate in the forums.
Jeff (dba) has been featured several times on STH as an author. He has written guides such as the Dirt Cheap Data Warehouse Build, the How to Wire an External SAS/SATA Chassis, and a 5.9GB/s LSI SAS 9202-16e controller. He was also one of the first people to offer to help and utilize his spare parts bin to help. Jeff’s thread on building a 1U web server for charity can be found here. Rumor has it that this will be a Xeon 5500 series build so it should run decently well.
Spartus has created a thread on the forums found here for his charity build. As our “global” builder, Spartus hails from Canada. His server project initially focused on building a small low power small form factor server. Very exciting to see what he will come up with.
Head over to the forums and feel free to help both participants with their builds. We are also looking for feedback regarding how we run these in the future. The major theme here is giving back for charity and it should be interesting to see how both fare over the next two weeks! Stay tuned for the web server build logs on both the forums and the main site!
