Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
One would have needed at least one monitor for these boxes with a KVM - you can't administer Windows from the command line. Add another $A450, plus a few dollars for a keyboard and mouse.
(In the year 2000, the P60 went bad and my server changed to an old Dell DeskPro with a 425 meg hard drive and 64 meg of RAM. Debian ran on this without a complaint until I moved to an AMD-based box a few years later.)
Let's add the updates to Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003. Plus the additional hardware costs - RAM, for example. Windows 2003 has its own POP3 server so it probably wouldn't have been necessary to continue with Exchange.
But then there is one factor to consider. With GNU/Linux one can run any of sendmail, exim, qmail or postfix - and rest assured that each is a full-fledged robust mail transfer agent. With the POP3 server in Windows 2003, one really doesn't know how good it is. Why would a proprietary software company give you a free MTA when it can sell you one?
As to the amounts needed to upgrade, let me put it at just $2000, although I fear very much that my estimates are on the lower side.
Five years ago, I started hosting my own DNS because I found the service provided by Australia's biggest telco, Telstra, to be rather flaky. So we need to add the cost of one more PC to the mix for running DNS on Windows. Plus the cost of a third Windows licence. Another $2000 would have been spent.
With GNU/Linux, I've spent a total of $A210 - $100 for a second-hand HP e-PC which does the work of a back-up server, and $110 for some extra RAM for my Cobalt server which does most of the other work. All my hardware has been hand-me-downs. The software, needless to say, is all free.
With Windows, the amount spent, at a conservative estimate, would have been in the region of $A10,000 - a fairly big amount for a poor man like me to spend on a hobby.
There's one more factor to consider - all this hardware needed to run Windows would have taken up a considerable amount of real estate in my little study. The e-PC and the Cobalt server both are headless. There is a wonderful piece of software called OpenSSH that can be used for remote administration. And there are three others in my family who need some space there.
Do you run GNU/Linux at home? Or for a small business? What is your outlay? And what would it have been if you had gone the Windows route? Your responses would be of interest.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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