[tech] Upgrading our PCs..

David Manchester mustang at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au
Wed Oct 25 10:55:02 WST 2000


> > Having one of the Celeron boxes in the clubroom with mussel's existing 
> > video card, and the other in the machine room doing something useful sounds 
> > good. Perhaps running squid (a few gigs of cache ought to be enough) and 
> > serving the webpages plus random other tasks. It'd also be another user 
> > machine. Of course, we could have two fast PC boxes out in the clubroom.
> >
> 
> I really don't think that squid for UCC is going to be a good thing any
> time soon.  If we are able to use UCS squid cache, then that is good, but
> removing a good console box to make goats load a bit faster once a week
> seems pointless.

Au contraire, as Nick is eager to exclaim, any squid is better than
no squid. Similarly, the UCS proxy will be charged anyway & how are
non-students going to use it?
Our own squid, with our own ACLs and our own traffic logs is better.

BUT that doesn't mean that a new Celeron user box needs to or should
be doing Squid or Apache.
More sensibly, Mermaid for squid with a couple of small IDE disks
for the cache & the new Celery becomes mermaid2, with Solaris x86
or something similarly different.
Mussel becomes the Linux dev. box we've always squawked about,
we get another general unix box for users, a games box for lusers
and we're back to 4 or so user boxen.

>  Mermaid seems to be hacking the pace quite well at the
> moment doing all the odd jobs in the machine room... why move it to an
> overpowered machine?  If this plan goes ahead we will have quite a few
> user machines in the machine room (mussel, mermaid, morwong, mola and
> kraken) mussel being the beastie for compiling (or maybe making it the X
> server thingy, and put all the x-terms on their own segment with mussel).

Why do the X-terms need to move to Mussel?
So you can run bloated, slow KDE or GNOME compliant WMs on them?

> > Then mussel becomes UCC's "big iron" in the machine room.

Yeah, so we have Mussel as a neato grunty box, along with Morwong,
<insert Mollusc-named Celeron here> and one of Dave T's Suns doing
Slowlaris or NetBSD.

Actually.... we could (should?) do squid on one of those Suns - the 4/470
or whatever it is takes mackerel/Merman RAM.
We bought some 32MB boards - we could have 96 or 128MB in it without too
much hassle.
I'll bring a VAX in one day.

I'll mail Nick Miller about those boards now (been in a meeting all morning)

Cheers
/dave
-- 
/ David Manchester <mustang @ ucc.asn.au> (UCC Wheel and Committee person) \
|       If Life hands you lemons today, smile and give thanks.             |
|     Then, when Life isn't looking, give him a quick knee to the groin.   |
\                              That'll learn him.                          /




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