While Apple sells its own top-of-the-line server, the XServe (remember that?), it may want to take a page out of its older playbook and start marketing older hardware. A gentleman running a NetBSD server off of his Mac IIci recently got a veritable deluge of attention from some folks on digg. Normally such high traffic would take down, temporarily, even the best of servers — but this one took a lickin’ and kept on tickin’.
The specs on this bad boy, made nearly 20 years ago:
CPU: Motorola 68030, 25MHz
Ram: Upgraded to 128 MB
OS: NetBSD
Web server: Apache
Upgrades: Cache card and 1 GB SCSI hard drive
[via Royal Pingdom]
Best machine ever made.
These kinds of things are a little goofy.
I have XServe's which run for months without fail. Site downtime is usually related to application server issues or database issues. The more complex and interactive a site is, the more that can go wrong. A static site shouldn't have any problems no matter what platform it is running on. If nothing else I usually need to take all my systems down for system updates once a year or so.