[tech] Down! With the machine room ;)

[Grahame Bowland]

On Wed, Sep 13, 2000 at 05:46:07PM +0800, Ben Rampling wrote:
> > 
> > Adding my own 2c. I really really think the machine room should go. We should
> > rip it down, and use the materials to have a nice little bonfire :) It really
> > does use up massive amounts of space. It may only be something like 2 
> > metres square but it ruins much space around it. A couple of lockable racks
> > would be a lot more useful really, (and perhaps another lockable cupboard,
> > to store things in).
> > 
> 
> As much as the club seems to enjoy tearing down and pissing on the work of
> others, the machine room currently keeps water and heat out (the roof leaks,
> remember), allows a vaguely secure network for internal machines (jack in
> to the black cable running around the room for fr333333 tr at ffic!), and
> provides a large (vaguely) secure space for numerous objects. Turning the big
> lockable box in to many small lockable boxes is silly -- the other space
> around the room isn't even used effectively.

Okay, I agree. Why don't we buy a couple of switches and put the boxes that 
use the most traffic (xterms, mussel, ..) onto them. That'll take a lot of 
traffic away from the hub. If we tidy and organise the machine room that'll 
help. If it still sucks after a reasonable amount of effort, maybe we should 
pull it down and replace it.

We definitely need to provide a couple of things we're not - SOCKS and maybe a 
proxy server. I'm around the clubroom lots and people often ask me with 
problems their having - and they often want to get outside PARNET/WAIX 
without a tartarus account. All SOCKS takes is someone with a knowledge of C 
and some time (plus the courage to look at libucc :) Squid ought to be easy - 
surely we can do whatever UCS do for charging with it.

So if we budget $500 for a Celeron box and $400 for two switches, we're looking 
at $900 for a substantial improvement to our setup. People that are saying 
we should do this in two or three years -- why? It's infrastructure - it's 
worth it and we'll benefit from it for quite a few years.

And I must admit the idea of using a welder sounds good. UCC-made lockable 
racks would be cool :)

Grahame

-- 
Grahame Bowland - http://gbowland.ucc.asn.au/