(OT) Stable Hardware with long availability

[Bill Campbell]

Does anybody have any recommendations for hardware, main boards, CPUs, NICs
in particular, that's reliable, and there is some guarantee that it will be
available for extended periods of time?

It doesn't have to be the Latest & Greatest technology as we want to use it
in Linux boxes for the SMB market that will be doing normal Internet
services, e-mail, web, firewall, ... that probably wouldn't tax a 1GhZ
Pentium processor, much less the high performance hardware commonly
available today.

We want to be able to do software updates from binary packages without
having to worry about hardware compatibility issues (e.g.  the ``gmp'' math
package, used by amavisd-new, compiled on Intel gives invalid instructions
on AMD -- or perhaps vice-versa).

I think there has to be some source of hardware of this type, if only for
systems used in applications where entire systems need to be certified as a
package (e.g. medical, aviation, etc.), and they can't be dealing with new
CPUs and main boards every six months.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676

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