Are there rules for building or purchasing a mainframe (i.e. host) in any of the books?

If I wanted to create an Orange-6 host to create a meeting room or a Blue-4 host to publish papers on local toxic pollution or a Green-3 to run a Stuffer Shack on, how would it be done?

Steal one from a warehouse or rob the Stuffer Shack.

Sorry, as far as I know, there isn't a published price although you could check in "Matrix" or simply price one irl and add an extra zero or two.

-Siege

As I recall, it was something like 5 million nuyen per point, but I hafeta check VR2.0

Basically, mainframes were only given stats so you could get bonuses programming big programs. I think memory is extra.

If you're really desperate, you could buy a lifestyle, rip out the home telecom, and mod the living hell out of it.

Right then, a mainframe costs 5 million nuyen times the security value to purchase, plus another 300K if you want to splurge and get the programming suite.

Essentially, that gives you a 5 task bonus dice to program anything up to twice the Security Value of the mainframe.

hmmm i use my cell phone as a dedicated server for halflife.. racks up a huge bill every month for all the minutes it uses.. of course, its woth it, because.... nevermind

Not as such. A Mainframe in this sense is more of a massive programming computer. What you want is a shitload of computer memory.

Why not split the difference and buy a midrange?

I'm an Ibm Iseries programmer.

I don't like the term mainframe very much.

Bah mainframes seem to be dying out, the future of computing seems to be in networkins many (many, many) smaller (and cheaper) computers together to do the job. What used to be a $2,000,000 mainframe is now 50 $10,000 computers with $250,000 in software holding them together.

Crusherbob is right.

You would think the future would have lower priced computers with tremendous processing power.

The larges Eseries/Iseries is about 1 million and can support up to 1000 users.

Something like that. Plus it will run Multiple Platforms (Unix, Linux, OS400, Windows)

The thing to remeber about a host is that while it might cost you $30 million to put it together, only about 1-5% of that cost is hardware. The rest of it is probably software which is going to end up being hard to sell, at best. I'm sure the company sprays their signatures all over the code for the thing (and probably the icon, too) so you'd have to crack it and then reprogram each and every piece of code in a host if you really meant to use it (who knows what kinds of nasty backdoors the corps built into their stuff?).

In any case, the PCs who made away with a host are probably looking at an actual value of 300k to 1 million nuyen in what they made off with. Once they negotiate to move it and split it out amongst them, it'd still be a winfall, but nothing like 30 million would be.

Software is likely to become a 'commodity' as well, so that the price will be largely controlled by the market rather than by the producer (read: much cheaper 'large' medium sized software projects). If the mainframe dosen't 'do' anything, then it should not really cost that much. If I wanted to buy a bunch of computers to run SETI@home (or whatever), why would I need to shell out several millions in software costs?

of course, you're not even considering the power costs. Even nowadays, places like Google.com who have huge amounts networked computers and mainframes worry about one thing over all others regarding their servers: power consumption. That's right, good'ol power. 70% of google's revenues go towards paying electricity. Imagine even after you managed to sneak the mainframe out of the server room (and I'm thinking a decent sized room, maybe 15x15 meters filled with computers) and into your fleet of trucks, but once you got it back to your shadow retreat, you'll probably blow the entire local grid from the power drain. Good luck!

Yep, even a 'reasonable' suite of computers can require re-wiring an office. You also need to worry about stuff like condensation, dust, fire, etc.

Comparing the costs to modern computers isn't very useful. Please compare to the cyberdeck costs and capabilities in Matrix and so on. We're talking a very "1980s" view of computer technology scaled up with fancy technobabble.

Physically stealing a supercomputer, or big cluster (like the one google runs on) would also be quite an absurd operation. The things are HUGE, delicate, they take a long time to dismantle (many many cables and screws), someone is going to notice the nanosecond you turn one off, the power company is going to notice when you turn one on (which will be a pain in the ass anyway what with rewiring the place all the way out to the street, AC, etc), and they could probably find the thing on the matrix again pretty easily after you do since they know exactly what they are looking for.

But the easiest way to have charachters do it either illegally or legally is to rent the space. Your pollution report things are just what should be on shadowland or some other underground host, they would probably even maintain them for free. Presumably it is possible to purchase secure meeting areas from those people, and that should not take much of a system anyway so they could just buy it.

People have stolen servers, even important ones, right out from under the noses of employees. There was an interesting thread on Slashdot about this sort of thing in the wake of those government server thefts in Australia last month.

Yea but a server can be just one desktop box, or a couple of rack mounts. A mainframe or cluster is something bigger.

Some things never change -- dress up in a uniform, carry a clipboard and look like you know what you're doing, that you're supposed to be there and how dare they have the nerve to question you?

People who are non-confrontational are less inclined to intervene (or pick a fight) for the chance of getting in trouble or even drawing attention to themselves.

-Siege

Awright, so here's one for you: Shadowland has its own server. I mean, obviously it has powerful backers, but how about a bunch of runners who want to set up a smaller setup? Might be something to think about for higher-powered games.

I forget which book it is in, if I run across it I'll post it, but Captain Chaos talks about shadowland host. He says that it is severral small machines hidden through out Seattle. I think they also mention it when talking about one of the syndicates. In fact they say something to the effect that if you saw the shadowland host you wouldn't even notice it, it looks just like a regular computer, it just takes a bunch of them to run the entire host. They say the gangs computers are spread out through out Seattle. So it seems to me that they use a distrubuted network system. So grabbing a peice here and there might get what you want enventually, and you if you have enough safehouses, you can do the same thing. Doing that will hide your power comsumption, and other telltale signs of running a server/host in one spot.

Shadowland notes are spread throughout the world. [p. 27, Target: Matrix]

Some real world data:

A mid-1980 mini computer (Siemens M-Series) with twin drive racks [4x9GB] and twin CPU-Racks [Each with the power of a Pentium-90] and some special pheripherie consumed 40A at 220V => 8800Watts. The unit came in six boxes, each about 1.5m high, 1.5 deep and 2 width. Each could be carried by four stoud persons

A current high-level PC-type server (Twin XEON-CPU) with RAID-5 [5x36GB] has two power supplies rated 400Watt each

A early-1990s mini-supercomputer (IBM ES-9000 IIRC) was about four meters long and two meters high/width

A current-model SUN Server of the Blade-familie can be mounted in a 19' rack and has more computing power than the mini-super above.

Birdy