Grex Internet Conference

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Grex Internet Item 32: Usenet and new modem update
Entered by raven on Tue Mar 1 05:58:57 UTC 1994:

        Does anyone know when USENET will go back to storing postings on the
local disk? It would speed up reading USENET news a great deal. This could
in turn free up more bandwith for people to do other things with the
internet connection like ftp and telnet. Also have the new modems been
instaled yet?

6 responses total.

#1 of 6 by srw on Tue Mar 1 06:25:56 1994:

As I understand it, we were waiting until the staff could install the disk
controller on the sun-3 so that the Eagle could be mounted.
This needs to be done for a suitable period (about a week) to allow
some final things to be copied off of it. Then the disk will be
reformatted and will become the sun-3's local news disk.

This work needs to be done pretty soon, as we'd like to be all done
with it before April 1, the date we move to the dungeon.

If I misrepresented any facts, I'm sure someone will correct me. This
question really belongs in the coop conference. I someone knows how to
link this to coop, I think that would be a reasonable thing to do.

#2 of 6 by remmers on Tue Mar 1 14:25:55 1994:

(Send mail to chelsea and/or tsty.  They're the fw's of coop and should
handle any linking.)

#3 of 6 by chelsea on Tue Mar 1 15:03:39 1994:

Done.

#4 of 6 by steve on Tue Mar 1 16:27:03 1994:

   Well, we're hoping that Greg and I can get to CE on Thursday
and do the initial test on the Eagle with the 451 disk controller
that is in a "Multibus to VME" card adaptor.  This will allow us
to use the old Sun-2 disk controller in the new environment.
There are configuration issues which might take a few hours
of beating on to solve.
   Once that is running, we need to bsee if the disk itself is
any good.  When CE had that power failure several weeks ago,
something, hopefully local to the bootable partition, happened
to the disk such that the Sun-2 wouldn't boot any more.  Hooked
up to the Sun-3, the boot partiton doesn't matter.  If all
goes well, we can have the disk available on Grex for a while
as people pull files off it, and then we'll do a complete
backup of the two partitions.  At that point we can reformat
the disk and make it ready to hold news locally.  We probably
want to wait a little while before doing that, just so we
give everyone time to look things over before we reformat
it.
   If the Eagle is not in good shape, then we're stuck
using NNTP through condor until a) we find more SMD disks
b) we find SCSI disks  c) we buy a SCSI disk.  Keep in
mind that the three Eagles are about 8 - 10 years old, so
it shouldn't surprise anyone if this last trusty Eagle
is dead.  We have our eyes and ears open for possible
donations of SMD disks, but nothing has become definite
yet.  I don't hold out much hope of a donation of SCSI
disks since they are still useful, but we did get three
of them in the GD donation of the Sun-3's so you never
know.  I'd like not to see us by a SCSI disk if we can
possibly avoid it, because I don't think its cost
effective right now.

#5 of 6 by gregc on Tue Mar 1 23:27:11 1994:

BTW, yes we have the new modems hooked up, sort of....
We have one of ours calling another Optima that Ivars owns, but everthing
isn't configured correctly yet, we're not using the ESP card at our end,
so we're only seeing a minor performance increase so far.

#6 of 6 by jared on Wed Mar 2 16:18:28 1994:

CCS has several SCSI hard drives that are very reasonable in price
and performance.  If you e-mail me with an idea of disk sze, we can get you an
idea of what it would cost to get that all set.

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