[tech] Down! With the machine room ;)

[Duncan Sargeant]

Grahame Bowland wrote on Wed September 13, at 20:20 +0800:
> On Wed, Sep 13, 2000 at 05:46:07PM +0800, Ben Rampling wrote:
> 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.

Grahame, that's the first and only sensible thing you've said all day.
Congratulations.  Do some tests, then borrow a switch or move our
existing one and do some more tests, and impress us with the results.

We already have one switch, you don't need two more (how many machines
do we have?)

> 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.

Right, and note that this requires zero expenditure and can be done on
current hardware.  Why don't we do this first, and then buy stuff
afterwards?

> 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.

sigh.  back to the baseless reasoning again already, Grahame?  Look,
no-one has presented a reasonable argument that the pentium is too
slow.  Call me a tight-arse, but you're already spending $500
upgrading it, based on nothing but heresay!  And you don't even have
the software running yet!  Why don't we prepare the wacky new router
on the pentium, implement, and then we upgrade if and when its too
slow.

We can run all the other wacky services on hosts where they should be
run anyway.

Your assertion that its infrastructure is exactly why you shouldn't buy
it first!  That's like buying a house and leaving it vacant for 10 years
before living in it.  Live in the cottage for a while and then upgrade,
then house will be one quarter of the cost by then.

Am I making any sense?

Similarly for the switches, there are plenty of switches around if you
ask nicely, why don't you borrow a couple and see if it actually helps
before blowing the money.

We may actually need all this shit.  But at least you'll know it was
needed and makes life better.  

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

yaaay!

,dunc