[tech] Moving dispense & decommissioning Mermaid

[David Adam]

Mermaid's had a good run, but I think it might be time to send it to the 
big server farm in the sky. It's running an old version of Debian on old 
("temporary") hardware, and most of its functions have been supplanted.

The only thing it's still running is the Dispense server (i.e. the binary 
that does the accounting and interfaces with the Coke machine hardware), 
which doesn't look too hard to move to a different machine.

I'm not sure which machine is a good candidate; Martello's serial port is 
already in use and it has a pl2303 USB-serial converter also in use. I 
have no desire to move Dispense to a Solaris machine or do serial 
passthrough on a Xen VM. That really only leaves Mooneye or Madako.

I know there's a plan to put Real PC Hardware into the Coke machine, but 
that seems to be making little progress at the moment.

Thoughts?

[DAA]