[tech] Upgrading our PCs..

[Anil Sharma <Grand Poobah Maset>]

> > 
> > 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 :)

Hasn't Luyer done that before? 


> > BUT that doesn't mean that a new Celeron user box needs to or should
> > be doing Squid or Apache.
> > More sensibly, Mermaid for squid with a couple of small IDE disks
> > for the cache & the new Celery becomes mermaid2, with Solaris x86
> > or something similarly different.
> 
> Solaris x86 sounds neato. Usable but different :) It'd be almost like 
> owning a fast recent-ish Sun box.
 
I personally would rather have the smeleries out in the club room.  Bright
shiny things attract people inside.  Especially when they can gang up on
useless iinet quake players - reform the UCC clan anyone?

Besides this, with mussel in the machine room then people will have ample
space on all the other machines to code/whatever and on the off chance
that there is more than two people wanting to code in the UCC at the same
time, and the rest of the club room is taken up (only happens during crazy
mangband/zangband/spellcraft phases) then there will be two nice
smellerons to kick people off.  Why waste a perfectly nice box with
solaris?  Put solaris on a peice of shit, because noone cares and it will
hardly get used anyway.  While it is nice to say, look we have all these
user boxes with all these different OSs, can't we put the ones that aren't
going to get touched on old machines, and let the fast ones run stuff that
people are going to use.  Oh that reminds me, is MS office still installed
on the mac?

> Damnit, I need a LISP interpreter to do my window managing!
> More seriously, Gnome blows little goats on an x-term anyway. As far as I can 
> tell CDE or mwm or something like that is about as pleasant to use as 
> anything. Lots of places are getting rid of Pentiums now, so we should be on 
> the lookout to replace xterms with console boxes.

mwm blows maggots. At least now I have a useful menu on it though.
 
> 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.

Can we get better mice for these things.  Ball mice would be sooo much
nicer, but I have no idea if these were even made.

> 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?

I'm sure we sorted this out the other day.  Remember you asked and I said
yep :).
 
> 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.
>

Cluster good.  I got disenchanted with building 10 486s for my cluster in
the UCC.  Prebuilt vaxen would be sooo much nicer.
 
Maset the Grandiose.
-------------------------------------------------
Without suffering,
how can one appreciate happiness?
And how would we mark the depths of our sorrow,
without the light of hope?