The Planet Blog

In 1962, Life International magazine published a logic puzzle that was said to be so difficult that it could only be solved by two percent of the world’s population. I’ve heard the riddle attributed to Einstein, and apparently Lewis Carroll is given a claim to it as well, but in the end, it’s simply a fun way to challenge yourself.

If you haven’t tried a puzzle like this before, don’t get discouraged and go Googling for the answer. Take your time and think about how the components are interrelated. If you’ve solved this puzzle before, this iteration might only be mental calisthenics, but with its new hosting veil, it should still be fun.

Einstein’s Hosting Riddle

A shelf in one of The Planet’s data centers holds five servers.
On a theoretical full shelf, each of the five servers has a single hard drive configuration, processor type, control panel (or absence thereof), server add-on, and operating system. No two servers on this shelf are the same in any of those areas.

• The Red Hat 5 operating system is being run on the Pentium 4 3+GHz server.
• The Dual Opteron server sits next to the server running the Cent OS 4 operating system.
• The Conroe 3060 server has a Checkpoint X16 Firewall as its add-on.
• The Single Woodcrest server has no control panel.
• The Cent OS 5 operating system is being run on the right of the server running the Windows 2003 Enterprise operating system.
• The server with an 80GB NAS backup add-on sits next to the server with two 750GB SATA hard drives.
• The server running the Windows 2003 Enterprise operating system uses Helm 4 as a control panel.
• The server running the Windows 2003 Standard operating system has two 750GB SATA hard drives.
• The server using Ensim Pro X as a control panel is in the center space on the rack.
• The first space on the rack is occupied by the Dual Opteron server.
• The Dual Xeon 2.8 server has two 146GB 10K RPM SCSI hard drives.
• The server with a LanTronix Spider KVM as its add-on has two 250GB SATA hard drives.
• The server with two 300GB 10K SCSI hard drives sits next to the server with the F-Secure Anti-Virus add-on.
• The server using cPanel as a control panel has two 500GB SATA hard drives.
• The server with two 300GB 10K RPM SCSI hard drives sits next to the server using Plesk 8.2 as a control panel.

Question: How much does the server with 20GB DiskSync add-on pay per month with The Planet (not including setup fees)?

Use The Planet’s Dedicated Servers and shopping cart to calculate.

You can assume that the servers have a base configuration (unless specifically noted in the clues above), that the owner of the server pays for components monthly (rather than in one-time fees), that The Planet’s promotions are not used, and that the 100 Domain licenses of the control panels are used for any control panel with price varying by number of domains.

Bonus Question: If a Private Rack shelf costs $325 per month and this particular customer pays only for the rack shelf and all five of these servers and add-ons every month, what is his or her monthly payment?

Submit your answers via comment, and I’ll let you know by email if you are correct. I’ll publish the comments with the correct answers in about a week (once other people have a chance to answer it without the risk of spoilers).

-Kevin

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 8:40 am and is filed under Evangelist's Corner. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.