[ucc-announce] Donations for manbo upgrade

[Nick Bannon]

manbo, the Sun Enterprise 6000 has settled in pretty happily to the UCC
- it's humming quietly just inside the machine room. It's currently
holding the non-/home network filesystems (such as the webpages on
/services and the Windows home directories).

Time for an upgrade!

It's at a sweet spot in its life cycle where it's cheap and easy to get
spare parts off ebay - as indeed we have already. So far:
1x PPS PSU (arrived), 6x power/fan modules (to send)		$221.00 + some more postage
1x E4000 complete system to scavenge - 6xCPUs,
   768MiB RAM, SBUS gigabit ethernet, 3x power/fan modules	$417.90

I think this nice 64 bit machine deserves more than 32 bits of RAM. We
can buy 10 gibibytes of RAM for about $1250 easily:
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5770226892
Possibly less, if we buy in bits and pieces.

So... I'm hoping to raise a nice round $2000, including the $638.90 so
far. Who'd like to chip in? Any amount's appreciated.

I've had a couple of volunteers so far, but I don't expect we'll raise
it all overnight. So - on the left hand side of the whiteboard, you'll
see a fundraising campaign thermometer - help me make it boil!

http://webcam.ucc.asn.au/
http://webcam.ucc.asn.au/archive/colour3/200505/04/23/09.jpg

Nick.

-- 
   Nick Bannon   | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick-sig at rcpt.to | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal