Which Ubuntu to pick, and CAT6 patch cables

Hey, I just noticed that last week Ubuntu released a new 8.04.2 LTS release which is a second bug release of 8.04 which came out last April. Now there seems to be three different versions of straight Ubuntu you can use (I won't even mention the bazillion Ubuntu variants out there). There is the current stable version 8.10 which came out last October but which they will support for 18 months until April 2010. Now the newer 8.04.2 release just came out which will be supported until April 2011 for the desktop edition and April 2013 for the server edition. And soon in April the new 9.04 release will come out which should be supported until October 2010. Too many choices!!

Well, believe it or not we ran out of CAT6 patch cables for our lovely building here at the university, so it was time to buy some more. When we moved into the building 5 years ago they gave us boxes and boxes of cables, but they have finally run out! I checked our regular places where we buy stuff, including CDWG, Newegg and Cyberguys, and to buy 20+ cables it was still costing us about $5-6 per cable. Not bad compared to the $10-20 you would pay retail at Best Buy or Office Depot, but I thought we could get them cheaper in bulk. On a hunch I thought I would check Provantage because I remembered when we were buying switches and transceivers they were actually cheaper than our academic discounted CDWG price and the typically always low Newegg prices too. Incredibly they are selling 7 foot snagless CAT6 patch cables for $2.42 each! Even paying about $10 in shipping, we can get 30 cables for only $82. Do you really need a brand name Belkin or Tripp-Lite cable for patching 7 feet between ports on switches? Not for twice the price you don't! Newegg actually had cables for a lower price ($1.99 each for 8+), but their shipping was charged per cable and cost more than the cable itself ($2.86 each!). CDWG ships to us for free, but their cables still cost over $5 each. Cyberguys was actually cheaper per unit than our CDWG price, but at $4.47 each and with postage added they were still more then Provantage. So Provantage was by far the price winner. I just love saving money, even if it is for our rather affluent university (hey, our endowment is down over a billion dollars in the past year!)

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