Cousins - Many of you have recently joined us - I hope you are having lots of success finding your ancestors and cousins!! Everybody, PLEASE POST (or re-post) YOUR LINES - with this many new cousins, surely we will find connections. This list will not help us, unless we post!! For the benefit of new members, and as a reminder to those of us who have been here a while: Do NOT send Flames (criticisms) to the list. Do NOT send Attachments to the list. Do NOT send Virus Warnings to the list. Do NOT send Chain Letters to the list. This message (below) was sent from Brian at RootsWeb to listowners last week - with his permission, I am sharing it with you. Brian and Karen, who work regular jobs and run RootsWeb in their time off, as volunteers (using money from their own pockets to keep it going, when that is needed), spent nights these past few weeks taking turns keeping the computers going during all the horrible weather in California We owe them our heartfelt thanks and our support - without them, we would not have these lists and all the other genealogical resources at RootsWeb. Please help in any way you can - and if you have ideas for other avenues of financial support for RootsWeb, PLEASE contact Brian and Karen directly. Brian's e-address is on the bottom of his post - Karen's is KAREN@rand.org. ***************************************************************** Hi all - This is a question that was posed in private e-mail by a member of the RootsWeb Webmaster/Listowner community. I'm passing along the question and my answer to everyone because other folks might be wondering about this. Cheers, B. -- Your message was: > Brian Leverich wrote: > > > The new search engine box is under construction on my bench now. I > > can't accurately predict to the day, but if we don't have any > > further serious disruptions (the power failures last week were sort > > of the disruptions from Hell ... ) I expect we'll have searches up > > within a week. > > > What's the cost of something like this? > > I would like to make a contribution to RootsWeb and designate it toward the > cost of the new search engine box. > > I realize it's not just a matter of money and that your time is also hard > to come by. I hope my post about the search engine wasn't taken as > impatience or ungratefulness. ------------------ Hi - The prebuilt VArServer 3000 we have on order from VA Research will cost us $13,500. That server is planned to be used as the upgrade to the current www.rootsweb.com server. The old www.rootsweb.com will replace the current mailhub.rootsweb.com, which in turn will become a dedicated DNS/MX server: nothing ever goes to waste at RootsWeb. (: The handbuilt search engine server, which is slightly larger/faster than the VArServer 3000, has cost us about: Server case & heavy duty power supply $ 500.00 Motherboard $ 500.00 Pentium Pro 200 CPUs w 512KB caches[2] $ 1,000.00 128 MB EDO SIMMs[8] $ 3,200.00 RAID-5 caching disk controller $ 1,800.00 Seagate Barracuda 9 GB ultrawide SCSI drives[5] $ 4,500.00 Tape backup $ 500.00 IDE 4GB system drive $ 200.00 3COM 3C900 100Mb ethernet adapter $ 100.00 Video board $ 100.00 CDROM drive $ 100.00 Keyboard & mouse $ 100.00 Misc cables, mounting brackets, & such $ 100.00 ---------- $12,700.00 Any contribution you can make would, of course, be much appreciated. BTW, and folks don't often realize this, it really is *much* more a matter of money than my time because money can easily substitute for my time. VA Research servers cost about 15-20% more than the machines I can handbuild, but buying preconfigured machines saves oodles of my time. If RootsWeb ran at less of a loss, we'd always be buying prebuilt servers and using my time that was freed up to do more useful things like getting whizzier cgi-bin tools set up for the Webmasters and Listowners. Cheers, B. -- Dr. Brian Leverich Co-moderator, soc.genealogy.methods/GENMTD-L RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative http://www.rootsweb.com/ P.O. Box 6798, Frazier Park, CA 93222-6798 leverich@rootsweb.com Carol C-H <cch@netdoor.com> proud sponsor of RootsWeb http://www.rootsweb.com/ To subscribe to Larry Stephens' Regional lists, including DEEP-SOUTH-ROOTS and NC-SC-ROOTS, go to http://php.indiana.edu/~stephenl/genealog.htm ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~REMEMBER MAISER - FIGHT SPAM!!~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~