OSDev.org

Today has been a wonderful day!
This is both an announcment post and a question post.

As for the announcment part, I can officially say that I am a business owner. DiNS LLC was formed recently and I have claimed my ownership in paper and to the government. I also closed a very important deal regarding a speedy aquisition of start-up capital. Now I'm seeking out local office space to 'setup shop' (so to speak). I now have the needed money to begin purchasing 'real' equiptment to be used as a prototype machine. That is where the question part comes in.

I have not decided on the hardware that will offically be running the DiNS OS. I know that I want a 1u rackmountable chassis and with a motherboard that supports multi-core xeons. I will also need two well documented on-board gigabit ethernet chipsets that are identical (for ease of coding). HDD space is not a big deal, but it must have a slot for a FDD.

I found this motherboard: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813121274
the only issue is that it has an odd socket and that it is a Thin E-Bay format, and that limits chassis's greatly.

I'm very familiar with setting up ATX-style computers, but I have no experience with setting up rackmountable computers.
any ideas?

also, are there any embedded systems that would be suited for this?

Have you had a look at the servers Dell make? It sounds silly to think of Dells as reliable servers, but we're using a tonne of them at work for file and web servers, and they seem to be solid as a rock. I'm not sure about having space for a floppy, but they do everything else. And of course, you don't have to spend time building them or anything. The only problem would be long term availabiliy... but then you can just start using a newer model.

The other good option as I see it is buying the servers as barebones... with the case, PSU and motherboard. As a vendor for those, ASUS* seems to be fairly reliable. I've never touched any myself, so I can't comment on how easy they are to work with. Again, unlikely to have space for a floppy drive, but will do everything else.

As far as getting a floppy drive in a rack case goes, the only ones I've seen with floppy spaces are things like Antec 3U and 4U cases. The 2U cases they make might, but I'm not sure. Those 4U cases are really nice to work with, they take standard ATX components. They are heavy and very large though. Also might take up more space in a rack than most people are willing to sacrifice.

Disclaimer: I work for an ASUS dealer.

well, I think i've found a good mobo-chassis combo. It isn't rack mountable, or even a standard server case, but it is small, and will make developing and transportation easier. I chose a microATX mobo and case so that I could take it to larger meetings to give a demo without needing large amounts of space or a back-brace. This is not meant to be a 'ready-to-buy' setup, just a setup that contains the hardware that I will use later, it doesn't have to look like anything special yet.

mobo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813182158
case: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6811144162

[edit]btw, I'm buying such a 'feature-rich' mobo because I have not run proper benchmarks on processor strain due to high network loads, I may find that it is too much for something and this makes it easier to just pop another cpu in and not buy a new mobo that supports better cpus.. Ill probably start off with a Xeon dual-core though. =)[/edit]

I may change my mind in the next minute, so who knows. =)
I would really still love to find an embedded device that I could program for. So far all the modular systems I have found either didn't have gigabit chipsets or were rediculously priced (>3k for just the board).