[tech] Upgrading our PCs..

[David Manchester]

> > 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 :)

'zactly.

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

Just don't tell Ian or Luyer.

> > 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!

emacsWM ?

> 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.

Why don't we set them up to boot/swap from one of DaveT's Suns?
The Sun login jazz has that natty XDMCP chooser, enabling them to
boot over the network & just be an X-term if we want, OR to use
the onboard CPU for boring little tasks.
Hell - the Classic even has enough CPU to play MP3s.

> 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?

Close - the IP address. I think they RARP, get an IP and then try to
TFTP get IP-address-in-hex.CPUtype, if that makes sense...

> 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.

Erics good. Especially if we're futzing with VAXen :)

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.                          /