[tech] Upgrading our PCs..

[Grahame Bowland]

On Wed, Oct 25, 2000 at 10:55:02AM +0800, David Manchester wrote:
> > > 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.

We'd probably want to hack coke charging into it; perhaps we could apply 
beer to Adrian :)

> 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.

Solaris x86 sounds neato. Usable but different :) It'd be almost like 
owning a fast recent-ish Sun box.

> 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?

Damnit, I need a LISP interpreter to do my window managing!
More seriously, Gnome blows little goats on an x-term anyway. As far as I can 
tell CDE or mwm or something like that is about as pleasant to use as 
anything. Lots of places are getting rid of Pentiums now, so we should be on 
the lookout to replace xterms with console boxes.

The good thing about xterms is that they don't break. I'm planning on setting 
up the SPARC boxes only that bench netbooting OpenBSD from morwong. That way 
random fools turning them off won't matter so much.

Oh, can anyone tell me how you get the boot image filename? It's some magic 
number like 825F658D.SUN4C - is that just the ethernet address expressed in hex
digits?

> > > 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.

Sounds good. There's definitely room in the machine room to hold some of those 
VAXen we took to Shenton Park a while ago. Maybe we could build a small VMS 
cluster up? I propose a UCC VMS day! And before we forget, Nick had the idea 
for a UCC Eric building day. These would both be cool events to look forward 
to after exams.

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

Great :)

Cheers,
Grahame