Colo Hardware Donation Checklist

Before hardware can be donated to one of our co-location facilities the following questions and issues should be addressed. In general, accepting machines that are no more than 2 years out of date means that many of these issues are already addressed.

• We can only accept rackmount machines.

• Rails and rail type (Snap or Screw). Rails should always be included in a machine donation either via the donor or by purchasing matching rails.

• Processors. At this point we can usually get decent processing power for donation. I believe we should try to accept machines that are no more than 2 years out of date.

• Memory. Again, memory is now cheap, let's make sure we get a reasonable amount. No less than 4G. (For package building machines, we are going to want to upgrade to either 8G or 16G.)

• Power Supplies. Depending on their intended use donated machines should be dual power supply.

• Management. All donated systems to remote colos MUST have some form of Integrated Lights Out or IPMI. IPMI is the preferred setup.

• Disks. SAS or SATA, but it's time to stop accepting SCSI as that's dying out. In disks, bigger is usually better. (However, for package building machines, 80G is sufficient.)

• Serial Ports. Nice if we can get them but they're fast disappearing from machines. If a system has Serial over LAN that's a decent replacement.

• Network requirements: how many ports, and on what VLANs? If a complex configuration, what topology is required and are we equipped to handle it?

• Netboot requirements: what MAC address, and it must be preconfigured for PXE before being shipped.

• Power requirements - how many ports, and likely average/peak use so that it can be placed on power controllers usefully.

• Shipping requirements: all machines should be individually wrapped with bubble-wrap (especially around rack-mount ears) and the remaining space in the shipping box filled up with some kind of material (newspaper, peanuts, etc.) so that the boxes will not get smushed.