The good news: The two new servers arrived (bought by donation made to, and assembled and shipped by, the GPU Users Group)! Here they are unpacked on the table in the center of our lab, along with the 45-disk JBOD (also donated by the GPUUG).



From left to right, that's the JBOD, georgem (Supermicro box), and paddym (Intel box). I'll have better pix when we actually start playing with this stuff. These will go a LONG way towards upgrading (and retiring) a lot of the older systems in the closet. We are excited, to say the least.

In less good news, it pretty much seems that bane (the former scheduling server) is toast. We hoped to revive it and use it to replace a bigger/older internal admin machine, but no dice. Fine. Meanwhile people who diligently scan our network graphs may have noticed how "grassy" they are (as opposed to flat) due to bursty activity. The obvious first suspect was synergy, now loaded with the extra burden of the scheduling server. Wrong. The next suspect was carolyn, the mysql server, as it was getting a little extra I/O this week due to a science database backup being stored on its internal drives. Nope. We ultimately found what we think is the cause: turns out upon reboot from the power outage on Monday bruno (the upload server) started up an automatic RAID verify, which is slowing uploads down. This verify should end sometime tonight, and things are already seeming to flatten out.

Also... I've been wasting way too much time today getting a new desktop for Dan in order (as his died on Monday as well). Luckily Jeff had an old shuttle PC he donated from home kicking around. However it's been a hilarious comedy of errors. The first two drives I put in it failed during OS install. The third drive worked great, but I installed an older version of Fedora to save Dan from having to deal with (the atrocity which is) Gnome 3. Well, while configuring that OS I was stumped why I couldn't upgrade any of the security packages. Turns out that version of the OS was already end-of-lifed. Aaaah! Well, I'm installing the latest version of the OS now and Dan will have to just deal with learning the Gnome 3 ropes. The irony of course is that, due to obvious priorities (because Dan can't work) I've been spending most of my day fighting with a very old desktop PC, while three shiny new boxes on the table behind me go untouched. So be it.

- Matt

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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

Thanks for the update Matt, nice new shiny hardware there, :-)

Claggy

That's sweet seeing the JBOD, and two servers! Thank you so much for posting that picture, now that they have arrived. I know things take time, and as always, stuff happens.

Steve

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Warning, addicted to SETI crunching!
Crunching as a member of GPU Users Group.
GPUUG Website

Nice update. I like the new shiny stuff you got today. Hope the fiddling with the old busted stuff can end soon with the installation of the new stuff.

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It's sorta nice to see all of our donors efforts displayed on one table. Thanks sincerely Matt for the picture and report. I hope you guys have fun installing all of the new shiny hardware!

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Executive Director GPU Users Group Inc. -
brad@gpuug.org

Pretty Pretty New Toys. ;))

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I Desire Peace and Justice, Jim Scott (Mod-Ret.)

def looking forward to its installation

Thank you for the updates and the pic, Matt!!
I feel your frustration having to work on old boxen whilst the shiny new toys beckon to you...LOL.

What the heck did they do during those electrical tests, eh? Mebbe time to put in a claim to their insurance company for damages.

Hope things smooth out for you and you can get back to working with some new stuff.

Meow!

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"Time is simply the mechanism that keeps everything from happening all at once."

Matt,

I second those thanks.

I'm so glad to see the servers unboxed again, and I really am looking forward to seeing the difference they can make to the project.

This means a lot to me.

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Happy Crunching,

Graham

Matt,

I second those thanks.

I'm so glad to see the servers unboxed again, and I really am looking forward to seeing the difference they can make to the project.

This means a lot to me.

As well it should, Graham.

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"Time is simply the mechanism that keeps everything from happening all at once."

"And User of the Year goes to..."

Live long and prosper Graham.
Deeply moved, deeply appreciated.
Alex S

Matt,

I'm so glad to see that the new machines have made it safely to your doorstep! It's to bad they have to go unloved until you get things sorted out in other areas. As Marvin the Martian would say, "Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex. I could pinch them!"

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-=Delty
GPUUG Webmaster
webmaster@gpuug.org

They look disappointingly small and have no reel-to-reel tapes... what's that all about?

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They look disappointingly small and have no reel-to-reel tapes... what's that all about?

Or 12-inch removable hard disks that hold, what, 1MB? (I remember seeing them when my father would take me to work in the 70s, but I have no idea how much they held.)

But seriously, folks...

Matt, thanks for the update. As for all the failures, they were probably close to failing anyway and it's better to have it happen when you're watching it and half-expecting failures, so you can deal them before they seriously bork the databases... right?

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David
Sitting on my butt while others boldly go,
Waiting for a message from a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

What, no card readers? No blinking (incandescent) lights? That can't be a computer!... ;-)

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Hello, from Albany, CA!...

Umm...Jeff can't work on his own machine???? Really??? Not meant as an insult but....?

Thanks for the update

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I've know quite a few people that were brilliant with software, but hardware & setting up an OS was not their thing.

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Grant
Darwin NT

I gave up on Fedora 15/16. Went to 14 and have been happy since; I like the 2.6.x kernels better anyway. It's EOL, but the updates are still available. Plus, someone has an extra repo for things like Firefox 10, etc: http://rpms.famillecollet.com/

Umm...Jeff can't work on his own machine???? Really??? Not meant as an insult but....?

With respect, it's Dan whose computer crapped out, not Jeff's.

Umm...Jeff can't work on his own machine???? Really??? Not meant as an insult but....?

With respect, it's Dan whose computer crapped out, not Jeff's.

Well, then can't Jeff work on Dan's crapped-out computer? Or... wait...

maybe we've discovered the problem...

Does Gnome 3 come in a coffin-sized cardboard box full of single-sided 5.25" floppy disks or something?

Or is it like OS/2 or early Windows NT and you load the OS pretty quickly then spend the rest of the week trying to find the right drivers to make all the hardware work properly?

Oh, how productive we were.

By the time you got the OS working correctly, all your software was out-of-date.

How I long for the days of editing WIN.INI and SYS.INI files. Can I relive those heady days of yesteryear by trying to use Linux? Think of all the money I could save.