GnuCash Hardware renewal: call for input

[Derek Atkins]

Hey all,

You might not have noticed but the GnuCash "everything" server
crashed multiple times over the weekend..  These issues have
been happening more frequently, and it's clearly a hardware
issue.  It COULD be a bad stick of RAM, or it could be a
mobo issue.  I could spend time trying to debug it, or,
considering the machine is a 1-core Celeron 2.4GHz machine
that was acquired four or five years ago, maybe replace it
with something more modern.

If I were to replace the hardware I think it would provide
more than just SVN, Wiki, and Email service.  I was thinking
that it would be nice to also provide nightly build services
on various OSes, perhaps using mock to build on various RedHat
and Fedora systems and providing a few Win32 VMs for dev and
test services?

I'm looking at two difference potential boxes and looking
for input from the people out there who might have additional
knowledge.

Config 1 ($2974):

- 2x Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® L5420 2.50GHz 1333FSB 12MB Cache (50W) 
  - Low Voltage
- 4x 4GB PC2-5400 667MHz FB-DIMM
- 4x 750GB SATA 7200RPM - 3.5" - Seagate Barracuda® ES.2

Config 2 ($3468):

- 2x Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ Model 2378 - 2.4GHz 6MB L3 Cache (75W)
- 8x 2GB PC2-5300 667MHz DDR2 ECC Registered
- 4x 750GB SATA 7200RPM - 3.5" - Seagate Barracuda® ES.2


Any suggestions or comments on these configs?  I really don't
have a good feel for the differences between the various CPUs,
both within a line and between Intel and AMD.  In particular I
suspect I'll just be running vmware-server on the base box and
then everything else will be in VMs.

Comments?  Suggestions?

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available