pcplantdb

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>]

Zope option: Using John H.'s machine as a temporary developent platform is one thing but paying for commercial hosting during that time and 
after even for as little as a year is a complete waste and probably a dead end street money-wise. What will happen after the 10K$ runs out 
if we don;t get more funding? How will we cover hosting and maintenance costs especially if usage of HG increases at the rate we hope for.
If we go ahead and buy a Zope machine for ibiblio then we can start from scratch there and will never encounter hosting, maintenance or 
hardware costs ever again.  We will then be able to handle and benefit from rapidly increased usage as we become more widely known; 
submissions of material to the database by many of those users should parallel this. We would then be in a good position to ask for and 
receive more funding and piecemeal donation via PayPal or direct payment. IOW I think we can expect a more rapid rise in traffic and
earlier supplemental funding if we start on ibiblio on a machine we purchase 
and donate to them and we should be able to reliably cover
the deficit in programming costs incurred during development. We can launch a 
fundraising campaign concurrently with permaculture.info.
goping online.
There may be good prospects for grants this summer and fall. A request for donations can be posted to the sanet-mg forum and the 
permaculture list. What about a SARE grant? tobacco settlement money? a low interest loan from the Permaculture Credit Union used to buy the 
Zope machine? (Scott: Is this even a remote possibility?). What about canvassing computer dealers or manufacturers for equipment donations: 
IBM, Dell, Intel.

I imagine the hardware could look something like this:

Intel rack mount case & power supply with hot swap bay for 4 - 74 gig serial 
ata HD's in a raid 5 array (case alone is near $1000 probably)
2 or more additional 200 gig ide drives mounted internally with additional 
IDE drives in external firewire cases
Adaptec Firewire/USB2.0 card
2 gigs ram, 4 gigs better (1 gig chips)
Intel dual Zeon motherboard 800mh frontside bus, 2 - 2.6 gh Zeon CPU's
Network card if needed

I don't see how this could cost over $6000.

--
L.F.London
lfl@intrex.net
http://market-farming.com
http://www.ibiblio.org/ecolandtech