Midget

also the weight of the old laptop would make it a pain to cart around over there and may cause grief with the airport - some airlines allow handluggage + laptop some don't.

I've always used my MSI Wind when in Africa with a battery pack from maplin. They're probably really cheap now second hand, or a new samsung atom based machine.

I've recently been having a play with a basic ML150. Good enough little server, installed ESXi to a flash drive on the internal USB and use the 4x drives for the datastore. It's not on the VMware supported hardware list though, but if you use the default ESXi install (not the HP altered one) then it does work.

My suggestion would be to use DC1 when it gets replaced as a backup server with a load of new HDDs and get either the large Tandberg or an autoloader. In the evening backup the servers to this machine and then during the day you can write it to tape.

dare I ask how this has been discussed in the NUT forums?

Banks are a rip off for exchange rate (has been stung far too many times in Africa) If you're coming back to the UK, book in advance - you get a crap rate on the day - for an exchange with Travelex Heathrow (unless there is a better rate with their Sydney branch) and take the cash straight to the bank. As for walking around with large sums of cash, I've converted over £2.5k to USD in Heathrow from a current account and walked it through customs in the UK and several African countries without a problem.

There's a pizza place near me that has Ubuntu cola, it's actually pretty good, and as they're supporting projects in Malawi, I fully support the company.

I'd also suggest Debian, and in case you don't know and would like something more 'friendly' ubuntu is based on debian and linuxMint is based on ubuntu. Both of which are easier for the novice to get to hands with.

Peugeot 406 Coupes are in your price range.

The "kuduzela" has been around for much longer than the vuvuzela. It's a kudu (type of antelope) horn and is used by Jews as a shofar. FNB have been offering them to customers but I haven't spotted any plastic ones around.

do you mean the royal we? How do you know the SMT aren't all for BSF?

What about getting a cheap mini fridge and ripping it apart and building it into the cab

so it's being hosted with the council and you connect to it over a leased line?

I used to do data recovery, so I've seen many many RAID5 arrays where 2 disks have failed near to the same time. Due to experience once one disk in an array fails, I will be expecting the others to fail soon after so prepare for it. We had one where the 2nd disk failed during the rebuild causing LOTS of fun.

Also don't forget that a "450GB" harddrive is only 419GB so you'll only have about 4.9TB of storage (minus some overheads) RAID50 seems far too complex and introducing too many points of failure for my liking. Especially as you don't really have 2 redundant disks because if 2 disks in one of the RAID5s fails you've lost that array, and with it also being RAID0'd you'd recover the total sum of bugger all. I would go with RAID6

synack i think youre thinking of a mirrored RAID5 (RAID 5+1?) not a striped RAID5 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/RAID_50.png

do you know how raid0 works? Data is written in stripes. if you have a 512kb stripe (most have this) and are writing 1mb of data, you have the same number of writes as if you are writing all 1mb to 1 drive. I've dealt with a huge number of RAID0 failures, and they're not always down to simply one hard drive dying. Software RAID0 for instance, is rubbish, but I assume that you'll have one of those basic RAID1/0 chips on most modern mobos. In this case if eeking an extra second from a game loading is what's required get 2 good 320GB SATA drives (WDs are about £35ea) and RAID0 them, and get a 1 or 2TB drive to store everything on. OS, progs and games go on the RAID0 pr0n, ISOs, mp3s and divxs go on the standard HDD. Once it's set up make a ghost image of the RAID0 and stick that on the 1-2TB drive. When the RAID0 fails, you can easily get up and running again with 2 new cheap drives and sticking the image on and you don't lose your data which is always a PitA even if it isn't highly important.

not it's not! You've increased it's chance of failing by a factor of 2. If the single drive has a 1 in a 1000 chance of failing, in a RAID0 it's a 1 in 500 chance of failing as you are dependent on both drives working. Also if the drive does fail, you will not be able to recover data easily if at all. Recovering from 1 drive is simple, recovering from a raid0 requires both drives to work fully and together, else you cannot recover any data over the stripe size.

RAID0 is named after the amount of data you'll recover when it fails.

Ive played with SSD in a Dell laptop and had no end of trouble with it. I would just go with the best SATA drive you can (and it wouldn't be a samsung) I have to wonder why you're spending so much though, there aren't many games out there that would have a slow framerate on one of those cards or utilise an i7 properly. I'm also amazed shinobi didn't suggest just getting a mac!

You have to weigh up the cost of cat6a install now versus ripping out your cat5e to install cat6a in the future. If you can persuade them to go with cat6a it'll save you hassle in the future, if not, cat5e will surfice, I know some unis who are still on 10mb/s. Also chuck that sc101 toaster in the bin, it's total trash and you are risking losing a lot of work using it because they fail. a lot. an old PC with FreeNAS on would be a safer solution.

well she IS american

"To eBay, Love Google -x-"

I got the exact same message! *feels less special *

If it wasn't for the fact I couldn't survive in the centre of london without pay I would be applying for this. Very worthwhile cause.