[tech] Upgrading our PCs..

[David Manchester]

> > We'd probably want to hack coke charging into it; perhaps we could apply 
> > beer to Adrian :)
> 
> Hasn't Luyer done that before? 

If he had, being dispense's author & a squid contributor, don't you
think we'd be using it?

> > 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?

Ah, so UCC = UWALAN. Cute.

> 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?

People complain that there aren't enough user boxes and Graham's #1
complaint is that the UCC doesn't have enough stuff that people
don't have at home - so why not stay home and use your fast PeeCee,
rather than slow ones at UCC & I think its a valid point.

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

Ahh yes, but how much fun is Sawthing going to be on a 4-bit greyscale
X-term?

> > 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.

*sigh* 

Yes, if the club wants to buy some. If not, stop fucking idiots stealing,
throwing away and scratching the optical pads.
I don't work for a Sun VAR (at the moment) so I can't tell you, but
type-5 mice are ~$70 or so.
We could buy a brace of $110 PS/2-Sun adaptor-things that let you use
a PS/2 mouse and kbd on them, but its a significant investment for a free Sun. 

> > 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.

Ah, but you all fail to understand what a VMS cluster is.
Its not failover-everything, its not process sharing,
its not Beowulf and its not MegaPOVray.
Anil - if you were building a cluster of 486es to do rendering in a
death-by-a-thousand-cuts method, you'll be very very disappointed at
the CPU performance of the VAXen.
Also - I don't know how many VAXen the UCC still has, whether they
have memory, or whether we really want half a dozen 3100s whining
away with shitty old disks.
If you want to do Webserving or backups, or something that's going
to move large chunks of data around, then you'll be surprised at
how happily they'll run.

Try http://www.openvms.compaq.com:8000/72final/4477/4477pro.html 

Cheers
/dave
-- 
/ David Manchester <mustang @ ucc.asn.au> (UCC Wheel and Committee person) \
|       If Life hands you lemons today, smile and give thanks.             |
|     Then, when Life isn't looking, give him a quick knee to the groin.   |
\                              That'll learn him.                          /