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Is there much business building custom rack mount servers for people? I would have thought that market would have been taken out by the big brands. Do you hav

• nehal3m 4y ago
  I do something similar as part of a team that builds bespoke equipment (can't be too specific). It's a full time job for 2 people for runs of around 50 custom half-racks every year. It's definitely a niche, but there's demand for sure.
• johnklos 4y ago
  ASRock makes some good motherboards, and all support ECC by default. Somewhat related: I don't like server motherboards like those from, say, Supermicro, because they don't care very much about security. For example, they've had motherboards for years that let you share the primary ethernet with IPMI. Is there a way to disable this? No. Is there a way to force IPMI to ONLY use the dedicated ethernet? No - the settings are stored in the battery backed memory. Wouldn't a jumper make sense? Sure, but they don't think so. What this means is that if your motherboard battery dies and your dedicated IPMI port is somehow disconnected, your server can be completely, 100% taken over via the public interface. While it's not a likely attack scenario, the point is that if you have a need to ship servers to various datacenters, you genuinely can't be sure that your server won't be utterly vulnerable on first boot unless you're there, confirming it yourself. Does Supermicro care? No. They refuse to consider the loss of all security due to a dead battery to be a security issue. Having a security issue is one thing - ignoring it when told about it (or worse - pretending it's not an issue) is something else entirely.