32 new of 175 responses total.
Congrats to janc, steve and remmers!
Rebooted Grex today, to make effective yet another change to perhaps make Grex a little better at dealing with fork bombs.
For the third time in Grex's history we've "rewound" uid's in the passwd file. Since the highest number uid (user id) we can have is 65,536 we've had to recycle uids when we've gotten near the end of the uid limit. This morning just a few minutes past mightnight, the uid count got to 65,501 so I changed newuser to start using uid 10,000 as we have in the past, but with a new "group" id, which is 53. Back in the olden days (ha!) all accounts were in group 50, called people. Then came group 51, "foks" and then group 52 called "beings". Today we're at group 53 which is called "humans". Here's a history of the groups: Group Date Started 50 (people) 06-jun-91 51 (folks) 24-nov-96 52 (beings) 10-mar-98 53 (humans) 18-dec-98 We've had about 162,000 accounts created on Grex now. Gosh, I think its time for me to do another strange statistics item about Grex's accounts...
Pretty quiet right now: Login Name TTY Idle Login Time Location Work Phone gal Terri Lynn qb Dec 18 11:59 Ypsilanti q keesan C. Keesan *p1 Dec 18 11:57 rcurl Rane Curl *r4 Dec 18 12:21
Hi Rane, is the telnet connection down again? Jim says hi, too.
Grex's net connection has been acting strangely since about 5am this morning. Technically, our ISDN connection is just fine, but a router "upwind" of Grex (or something like that) has been intermittant.
Long delays in emailing short files.
I've gotten some weird delays using Backtalk, also.
Seems to be okay at the moment.
I was on this morning when it went deep-six. Right in the middle of composing a msg. too. I tried for a couple hours after that, but no dice. Glad to see it back up.
We've been stable for many hours now. With luck we won't have that for a nice long while.
greg, look in your home directory for a file called dead.letter which will have the text you put into the message when your login disconnected.
Now, Merit is not authenticating. Doesn't seem to affect the load here.
Everyone please come check out the auction! We're up to 32 new items.
Re. 155: Thanx, other.
We now have possesion of one of the Sun-4/690 computers that have been donated to us. It's... beautiful, and *heavy*. We have the "card cage" which can hold up to 16 cards, and the CPU card. Missing, but coming to us are the CPU modules themselves. All the system needs is memory and 220V power to run.
Do we have any tasks earmarked for this thing?
Well, its most of what we need to create a second CPU. Before we got this system, if Grex's motherboard died, we'd be dead 'till we went out and bought a 'new' 670 motherboard. Now, we have a new motherboard such that we have a backup. We have backups for just about everything else, and not having that for the motherboard was troublesome. We'd been looking for "cheap" motherboards, and we were in the process of negociating for a $400 - $500 one when we got offers for *two* such systems or parts. Once we get the second present (which includes 128M of SIMMs) from California (cards, cpu modles, memory) we'll be able to build up a system and test it. That should hopefully give us two working motherboards, one set of CPU's and a batch of memory. We'll test them out on the old Sun-4/260 chassis, and then we'll know that we have a backup for Grex which will let me sleep better at night (I actually had a dream about not having backup hardware). We also have a second set of CPU modules on the way, we think, such that if we get more memory we could have two Sun-4/670's with a backup unit.
Is there likely to be a problem with wiring in a 220V circuit from the circuit box? Any idea what amperage the service is and how much the current equipment draws?
There are several options on the 220V power supply. I've used step-up transformers before with success. The other would be to get a 220 line brought into the pumpkin, and the third is to not worry about getting 220 installed, as we have other chassis in which to run another Sun-4/670. We still have a couple of the Sun-3 chassis, one of which was the Sun-4/260 we used for several years. Chassis we got lots of. ;-) The other possibility is to get a 110V power supply. One of the neat things about this hardware we just got is the fact that things are modular. The power supply looks like a square-ish suitcase, and plugs into the main box. I *think* there is a 110V version that was made for smaller installaions but I'm not sure about that. The power supply needs a maximum of 1200w or about 5A at 220V.
(This coming from a man who knows jack about computers) any feasible way to run the processors simultaneously and speed grex up? Or, possibly, split grex into two pieces with conferences and party on one machine and everything else on the other? Like I said, I know nothing. So I might as well ask.
I think the old Sun-3 chassis I took apart a long ago time had a transformer in the base that could be wired for either 110V or 220V.
Re resp:164 - Yes, the plan is to distribute Grex functions over several machines eventually. Running mail on a separate machine is the highest priority, I think.
Yup. Once we have some of the technical infrastructure in place it will be possible to start spreading things over multiple machines. Mail processing will be the first, and will likely have the biggest impact of any single thing we could do.
I have a question... How do you put a message on the login board advisory thing-a-ma-jig? do you have to be a member to do it??? MJK
You have to be staff, or one of a few people that have been given permission. With thousands of users, we can't allow just anyone to update the motd (Message Of The Day) file. Re: The Sun 670 donations: The really *cool* thing is that we are getting multiple spares for less than we budgeted to buy a single set of spares. We may also be getting some nice disks, so that Grex will have a much lower hardware budget for the next year or two.
On the other hand, mark, if you have something important to put there it's fine to ask a member of the staff if they'd put it there for you. They may not agree since we try to keep the MOTD short -- but if it's genuinely of interest to all Grexers they probably will. ;)
1200 watts is a space heater. Does the computer run at that all the time?
1200watts is what its rated at being able to deliver. It would consume less than that for just one card in the box. My guess is 500w but we'd have to check to make sure.
Again, supplying yourselves with 220 volts is a simple task, given two adjacent empty circuit breaker slots in the fuse box. (Would someone check the box to see if there are?) You could very well end up wanting it sooner or later anyway. So you might as well run a 220 volt line for this upgrade.
(we should move this discussion to the Garage, I think)
We are heating our house under constructin with a 1200 watt space heater and it has maintained 46 degrees, with 10 degrees out. With single glazing. It could get pretty hot in the pumpkin. Jim suggesting moving grex to the house and I would not have to pay for any heat.
You have several choices: