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| Author |
Message |
khamsun
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hardware testing ?
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Sep 25 08:37 UTC 2005 |
On the Grex status page of HVCN, the message was something like:
"Grex will be down until someday for hardware testing"
hardware testing?
hammer? chainsaw? dropping the box from a 20-storey building? immersion
in the deeps of lake Michigan? nuclear radiation?
or the power cord was just loose?
:-)
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| 43 responses total. |
mary
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response 1 of 43:
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Sep 25 11:04 UTC 2005 |
Yes.
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mcnally
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response 2 of 43:
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Sep 25 19:46 UTC 2005 |
We had hoped that by bombarding it with gamma rays that we could
turn it into a Super Grex which would simply grow huge, split out
of its enclosure, and go on a rampage when stressed instead of
merely crashing. Unfortunately it didn't work. In restrospect
we should probably have listened to Rane's opinions on the matter
but we thought Dr. Banner knew what he was talking about.
Actually it was down for extended memory testing to see whether a
bad DIMM could have been responsible for the recent crashes.
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naftee
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response 3 of 43:
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Sep 25 21:36 UTC 2005 |
i think rane would enjoy playing with gamma rays
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mcnally
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response 4 of 43:
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Sep 25 22:51 UTC 2005 |
Gamma radiation is not a toy!
<stern look>
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khamsun
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response 5 of 43:
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Sep 25 23:43 UTC 2005 |
gamma rays to try to make a recent peecee box reliable as a tweny years
old Sun that one can get on Ebay for the price of a six-pack beer...
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tod
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response 6 of 43:
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Sep 26 03:14 UTC 2005 |
What's the verdict from the h/w tests?
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mcnally
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response 7 of 43:
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Sep 26 06:40 UTC 2005 |
No memory defect found.
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mcnally
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response 8 of 43:
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Sep 26 06:41 UTC 2005 |
(to the best of our recollection..)
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tod
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response 9 of 43:
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Sep 26 15:57 UTC 2005 |
That's too bad whatever you told me isn't the cause for...uh..what are we
talking about?
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cross
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response 10 of 43:
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Sep 26 17:08 UTC 2005 |
The operating system sucking.
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mcnally
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response 11 of 43:
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Sep 26 22:06 UTC 2005 |
I hope that the theories about this being an OS problem are correct and
that addressing OS deficiencies will fix the problem. But I'm still
highly skeptical, since none of the OS-upgrade theories suggested so far
do much to explain why Grex had several months of stable operation on its
current operating system and then began experiencing more-than-daily
crashes.
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nharmon
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response 12 of 43:
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Sep 27 12:44 UTC 2005 |
I seem to recall a lot of software installations being requested and
approved. Not to say this was wrong, but there are a lot of variables here.
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naftee
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response 13 of 43:
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Sep 27 14:28 UTC 2005 |
you seem to be unlucky
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cross
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response 14 of 43:
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Sep 27 15:28 UTC 2005 |
Most likely, someone figured out how to tickle some bug in OpenBSD
and has fun doing so on a near-daily basis. I don't think anyone
has ever tried to correlate crash times to who was logged in at the
time (if they did, I'm not sure what the data would look like; there
may be one or more people using different accounts coming from
different ISP's doing whatever they chose to grex).
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mcnally
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response 15 of 43:
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Sep 27 16:45 UTC 2005 |
re #14: That is a definite possibility, and one that I've been pretty
concerned about. Is the latest version of OpenBSD so exploit-free that
we can expect it to survive a determined vandal with local shell access?
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tod
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response 16 of 43:
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Sep 28 03:42 UTC 2005 |
Is Grex on a rack mount server?
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mary
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response 17 of 43:
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Sep 28 11:45 UTC 2005 |
No. Our co-lo charges us by the server, not by rack space or
footprint.
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cross
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response 18 of 43:
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Sep 28 21:34 UTC 2005 |
I think Todd was asking whether the box is a rack mount chasis. It is
not. It's a standard tower case.
Regarding #15; I think the reports of OpenBSD's security have been greatly
exagerated.
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tod
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response 19 of 43:
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Sep 28 23:20 UTC 2005 |
Is Cyberspace considering a move to a rack mountable chasis?
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gelinas
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response 20 of 43:
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Sep 29 01:14 UTC 2005 |
Depends upon your definition of "considering," Todd. It's been mentioned a
few times, now and again.
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khamsun
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response 21 of 43:
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Sep 29 08:27 UTC 2005 |
I used to run OpenBSD since 2.6 x86 for
gateway/firewall/http/ftp/p2p/ssh an I recall now that once I
experienced some weird crashes.After much head banging on the walls all
around, I found that the soldering points on the motherboard were
slightly too pointy and after I added cardboard between the back of the
mainboard and the case, the problem disappeared.
Bad occasional combination of small vibrations and heating, enough to
generete small electrostatic discharges between the back of the board
and the case.
A hardware failure will let a log from some i/o subsystem, and faulty
memory will be diagnosed by segfaults spitted out by some compilations.
Grex could run for the contest of the most unreliable OpenBSD box this
side of the Pecos.
But we could also bet by PayPal on the cause of the crashes, the sum
goes to the board to buy a book on unix security.
Ok, i hurry to log out before the next crash occurs.
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nharmon
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response 22 of 43:
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Sep 29 13:54 UTC 2005 |
I've always been leery about using a custom built PC as a production
server. I understand Grex being a non-profit and all it has to keep
costs down. But I think we should consider investing money in better
hardware before we pay someone to fix the software.
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cross
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response 23 of 43:
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Sep 29 16:32 UTC 2005 |
Installing FreeBSD on a Dell or IBM server would be preferable to what
we're doing now.
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mcnally
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response 24 of 43:
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Sep 29 18:01 UTC 2005 |
Because of the FreeBSD part or because of the Dell or IBM server part?
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