The French donation is a 4U 6CPU Pentium III-750 system with 2GB of RAM and three or four
9GB SCSI drives in a RAID setup; and three 1U Celerons. 2GB for the 4U because it comes
with one but the donor is upgrading it to two for us. The other equipment mentioned was
for us to consider and the donor would then allocate it among all of the projects which
were competing for it. We didn't get it all.
On the technical side, it was decided that the Celerons just aren't suitable for the
US site because the US Squids require roughly comparable specifications and the Celerons
aren't really fast enough to be page builders, given the shipping costs to get them to
the US. So, European Squid caches is the role they best fit. They will need a fairly cheap
RAM upgrade to be Squids. These squids will speed things up for those in France and
possibly more of Europe who are not logged in, by avoiding the sometimes slow or broken
transatlantic links, and for everyone by taking some of the load from the US-based
Squids.
The 4U 6CPU is best for the US side. That's the main page building site and putting it
there will help everyone who's logged in or getting a non-cached page. Because peak
load times are different in different parts of the world, the same amount of resources for
the central site delivers more benefit than dedicating them to any one place. Also, the
lag from locking and unlocking the database records across a slow link (the internet
instead of a LAN) would hurt performance for everyone, by keeping locks for longer than
necessary.
The donor requested that the celerons be named chloe, bleuenn and ennael. That seems like
a reasonable request to accept, since we don't yet have a naming convention for remote
or donated equipment. I doubt that a corporate donor would want their name associated with
problem reports, so I expect that we could discourage corporate names if we wanted to.