Eric's still out of adjectives post #13: A good year for hardware...

I know I promised my next post would happen quickly, but I'm an astronomer, and astronomers consider anything that takes less than a few million years to be quickly. I was going to post yesterday, but I got immersed in coding. Specifically fixing some compile problems in BOINC caused by the assumption that all the world is Visual C++, or Linux, or MacOS, rather than a mixture of all three and quite a few more. By the time I looked at a clock it was 7pm and time to pick up Angela and head home. After dinner, I did a trade study on the benefits of blogging versus having a glass of wine and going to bed. Wine and bed won out by a narrow margin.

It's been a good year for hardware donations. On Friday a box from John Galt 007 showed up containing an HP quad Xeon 2.8GHz 10GB server. Matt's working on getting it set up. This one is probably going to have a multipurpose existence as a web and download server and as our way into the lab from the outside. Right our login gateway is Milkyway (our former web server) an dual 450MHz SPARC with 1GB running Solaris. While a 450MHz processor might be fine for tunneling one X11 session over compressed secure shell, it really suffers when we all need to be logged in at once. A quad 2.8GHz should do the job much better, even if it's also acting as a download server. We haven't decided on a name for this machine, but we're considering resurrecting the name "clarke" in honor of our recently departed friend. The old "clarke" was also an HP machine, a dual 750MHz PIII running Solaris that acted as a database server for our Galactic hydrogen studies. Everyone should thank John and add him to your friends list....

Our old web host Milkyway's job is being done by another donated machine that arrived earlier this year. It's a 1U dual 2.4GHz Opteron 16GB machine that we are calling thinman. The donor prefers to remain anonymous, but I'll just mention that the donor has been very generous to us, and more recently sent us a remotely accessible KVM switch with cables for 10 machines. He/she knows who he/she is, so I'll say another "Thank you/you". Damn, I wish there were a gender neutral third person pronoun in English.

We've also gotten an offer to donate a few more, but slightly less capable, machines. If that comes through we should be looking good for the near future. Even at our maximum sending rate (currently we can hit 90 Mbps on our 100 Mbps link) we shouldn't be taxing the servers we'll have. So we should be good until we can convince a commercial donor to donate the equipment ($30K or so) we need for gigabit connectivity down to campus (and therefore the rest of the internet). Dan's been working on that one....

So that's it for now. I'm off to lunch with the crew.

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Great (good news) update Eric.
Very kind of the Donors, John & Anon. Good job the project has friends like this :)
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Thanks for the news and update Eric. It is much appreciated.
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He/she knows who he/she is, so I'll say another "Thank you/you". Damn, I wish there were a gender neutral third person pronoun in English.

Our old web host Milkyway's job is being done by another donated machine that arrived earlier this year. It's a 1U dual 2.4GHz Opteron 16GB machine that we are calling thinman. The donor prefers to remain anonymous, but I'll just mention that the donor has been very generous to us, and more recently sent us a remotely accessible KVM switch with cables for 10 machines. He/she knows who he/she is, so I'll say another "Thank you/you". Damn, I wish there were a gender neutral third person pronoun in English.