@rev_posix: no worries. I told him pretty much the same thing. and he got all three for about 250 dollars total. I know he wants to use one as an FTP server for the house so he can put all his stuff in one place and access it anywhere....within limits. Not sure what he was gonna use a business server for....he installs car stereos and starters.
@Bobboau: I'll tell him to check out the ubuntu software. we've used it before for a desktop so we have a general idea how that one works. And at the risk of sounding like a complete idiot considering I work with comm computers all day in the army.......whats a cloud?
If that's his business, I'd image that he's looking at just having some kind of 'hey, I'm here, look at what I do and can build for you' kind of page. If that's all he's after, it would probably be a lot easier and less expensive over all for him to rent a server at one of those 'VPS' companies and be done with it.
Three Xeons for 250? Oh crap, those do sound like the P4-based Xeons. Have fun with those, I wouldn't buy them. If they were given to me, I might take them, but I sure wouldn't pay any money for them (points to the DDR ECC RAM and power draw comments earlier).
As for The Cloud (cue trumpets), you can get more details at
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Cloud_computing, but inna nutshell...
At it's simplest, a 'cloud' is just a collection of computers that is hidden behind a single interface (web site, IP address, etc). An example of 'cloud computing' would be google docs or gmail. If you use either one of those, you are 'in the cloud'. Pretty simple, in a way, yes? If this sounds like something that has been going on for a long time before the term was used, you would be right. There really isn't anything new about 'The Cloud(tm)', it just has a new fancy word, kind of like Comcast changing the name of their service to XFinity. It's the same thing as they have always offered, it just has a 'sexier' name.
(Ghods, I have marketdroids and salesweasles, they keep making my life more complicated and stressful...)
The term 'cloud computing', in my opinion, has been abused and misused by marketing people to the point that it's pretty much a meaningless word now, and tends to annoy me when I hear it used incorrectly.
It also can cause others smarter than I to devolve into severe rants of how badly it's been applied and threaten the pets of the person who used the term.
