[tech] Down! With the machine room ;)

[Grahame Bowland]

On Wed, Sep 13, 2000 at 10:19:51PM +0800, Duncan Sargeant wrote:
> > 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?

Good idea. I didn't mean to imply we needed new hardware for this - of 
course we don't. Just wanted to raise the issue. Of course, squid would 
probably kill mooneye. For a lecture on why, go to Adrian's thingy on 
Friday ;)

> > 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.

Like, umm, the router? :) We've already defined a heap of services that 
most people seem to think are appropriate for it. And the Celeron idea 
wasn't mine, it was an idea of [TDH]'s. The point was that we'll need 
lots of PCI slots for network cards, and getting a Celeron motherboard 
might be a cheap, fast and reliable option.

> 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.  

Good point. We probably should do testing. The basis for my comment about 
there being too much traffic on the clubroom hub is that you get substantially 
less than 10Mb on it when all the xterms are in use -- and the other day the 
OpenBSD boxes were even spitting out excessive collision warnings. Of course, 
that could just be a box with a bad network card or something.

Sorry if I seemed hasty,
Grahame

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