flynn with some original savvysearch servers dscf0961

Sets

search.com hardware [9 photos] cnet had a top-notch network and systems administration team, so we were rarely hands-on with our hardware.

over five years, i only made two colo trips; one a flight to boston to shut down the original savvysearch.com and ship the machines to california; and two to get eight new search servers online overnight when the network admins were over-loaded.

in the summer of 1999, in preparation for re-launching cnet search.com, cnet shelled out $11,000 each for a farm of va-research (known later as va-linux and sourceforge) servers named “full-on”.

funny thing is, these $11,000 servers were almost identical, at the component level, to the servers we hand-built for savvysearch.com, mp3meta.com, and financemeta.com - same motherboard, same cpu, etc.- only CNET paid a premium of $10,000 / server “for the vendor support”. if you're familiar with the va-research saga, they bailed out of the hardware business and we ended up supporting the hardware ourselves.

i would gladly have pocketed the ~$250,000 hardware budget and delivered some equal or better machines!