Metasploit Hardware - Update

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

I would like to thank the dozen people who made a donation in the last 24 
hours. My employer was able to depreciate the cost of the appliance down 
to only $200 USD and we have received almost $400 so far. 

There was one individual who contributed over half of the entire pot; we 
will be contacting him and offering to refund the difference. Donations 
are still appreciated and will be useful for funding the shirt/poster 
runs. All donations of $100 or greater get you a link to your web site 
(or that of your organization) on the donations web page.

A few good questions were asked and it seems best to just address them all 
at once.

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Q) Would more bandwidth help?

A) WireWeb provides a 30Mbit link at no monetary cost, we have survived a 
dozen slashdottings and a handful of DDoSs without any problems.  We 
serve over 1TB from the web site alone each month. 

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Q) Why did you upgrade to a crappy appliance box vs going for a 
new/high-powered server?

A) Our hosting provider has limited rack space, I live about 90 miles 
away, and I really didn't want to have the metasploit site offline for a 
week while I found a viable rackmount server. Dedicated hosting 
providers, such as Rackspace or ServerBeach, wanted at least $99/month, 
48 hours for setup, and provided crappy hardware with only about 2TB of 
included traffic. The web server and opcode database have run off a 
measly 600Mhz CPU for two years and performance really hasn't been much 
of an issue.

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Q) What was wrong with the old server?

A) Three things actually. One of the RAM sticks was flaky (it had 1.25Gb), 
the PSU fan would randomly die, resulting in it overheating, and 
something else entirely (mobo or cpu) was causing random hardware 
lockups. The rackmount case looks like it was dropped down a flight of 
stairs, the plexiglass security plate on the front has been smashed out, 
and most of the screw holes have been stripped. Its amazing that the box 
survived as long as it did. 
 
Q) Whats with the art, can we see it?
A) The artist just returned from vacation and is working on the final 
graphic. _dose has offered to vectorize the final image and get it ready 
for printing. We have some quick sketches that we might be able to scale 
down and share with the list...

--

Thanks again!

-HD