Metasploit Hardware

[hdm at metasploit.com (H D Moore)]

Hello everyone,

The metasploit.com server suffered two hardware lockups today and was 
finally replaced. The problem appears to be related to the motherboard -- 
everything else has been replaced over the last two years and the lockups 
have become more frequent.  The server is graciously hosted at a company 
called WireWeb in San Antonio, who provide free hosting with nice 
bandwidth in return for sporadic technical help (code, administration, 
etc). 

The admin was nice enough to drive downtown to meet me twice, at thirty 
minutes each way, in order to get the server back online.  I no longer 
live in San Antonio and only had a twenty minute window to replace the 
system with something that would fit in the rack-mount slot. My employer 
was able to sell me an appliance from inventory at cost (minus the hard 
drive) and this was used to replace the dying server. The new appliance 
has about four times the processing power of the old server, but is 
definitely no speed daemon (yes, we had a 600Mhz CPU before). The high 
cost is mostly due to the small form factor, low power consumption, and 
easy maintenance.

The short of it is that we had an unexpected $800 USD expense in order to 
keep the metasploit.com site operational. Previously, donations have been 
used to replace parts and upgrade drives, but at this time, we are 
actually at a negative balance[1]. If you would like to support the 
project in a way that is immediately appreciated,  a donation to our 
PayPal account would go a long way. To donate, please visit the URL below 
and click on the "Make a Donation" button. Thanks!

http://metasploit.com/donate.html

-HD

1. The new artwork should be ready within the next month. We are pretty 
excited about it and plan on doing a run of shirts and posters as soon as 
we figure out the best way to handle it.