[tech] Machine Room

[Simon Fryer]

> A while ago Grahame Bowland tapped:

> As an individual who will have no *real* exams after tommorow
> morning I'd be willing to give tidying up in there a go on
> Sunday (or whenever I don't have an exam on.)

That would be great. 

> It would probably be a good thing if we could arrange things
> better in the racks and make the power a little more stable.
> Its been better since the recent cleanup, but there are still
> power connectors suspended together in bizarre and worrying
> ways. (A couple of times the switch has lost power.)

I have given this some thought. Here are my suggestions. In teh 
corner of the machine room there is a wall mounted rack with a small
dec rack underneith it. Moving all the networking stuff  (router,
hubs and switch) in to the wall mount and dec rack would be a wise
thing. Next to this rtack is another dec rack containing mussel. 
AFAIK the only two machines using 100MB are erwin and mussel. 
Erwin can continue to live in the corner and mussel in it's rack. 
Maybe moving mermaid into the same rack as mussel. This leaves a
number of mini-towers in one of the racks. It may be possible
to move the minitowers back onto the desk. This should leave
a large rack almost empty. I have recirently aquired a Sparc 
VME CPU card and am interested in putting mackerel/mermans 
cage into this rack. 

By doing some sane cabling it may even look neat. 

Anyway, this is my suggestion. 


> What actual needs to be done beyond tidying and fixing the
> power?

Nothing really. We can see how long each machine stays up before it 
crashes?

See Ya
Simon

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Well, an engineer is not concerned with the truth; that is left to 
philosophers and theologians: the prime concern of an engineer is 
the utility of the final product."  
Lectures on the Electrical Properties of Materials, L.Solymar, D.Walsh