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Grex > Coop12 > #46: November 3rd, 6:00 PM, 607 Ross St.: Special meeting to discuss the future configuration of Grex |  |
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| 25 new of 181 responses total. |
mcnally
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response 131 of 181:
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Nov 4 04:17 UTC 2001 |
Although most of the debate seems to be focused on which processor
and OS platform to choose, my advice is to concentrate more on I/O
performance (specifically, disk access.) But perhaps that's obvious..
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lk
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response 132 of 181:
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Nov 4 05:24 UTC 2001 |
Just to comment about the hardware section of #129, I think a P4 is
cheaper than a Pentium III SMP system and (unless we're talking about
the more expensive Xeon's) will provide better and more than enough
performance. (Definitely go for the 478-pin P4s so there is an upgrade
path.) We're talking $900 for a standard 1.5 GHz system with 512 MB,
though adding SCSI drives will bump that up a bit.
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janc
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response 133 of 181:
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Nov 4 05:40 UTC 2001 |
The short form of the outcome:
OpenBSD. This won out over FreeBSD because Marcus and STeve feel that
the security advantages it offers outweigh the disadvantages in features
and performance that FreeBSD offers.
Sparc64 or Pentium. No decision has been made. We are going to try to
get some cheap machines of each type, and start developing the Grex
OpenBSD configuration on both. We are going to postpone the purchase
of the actual Next Grex machine until we have an OpenBSD set up that we
are ready to put into production. This way, if it takes us a year again
to get the new system set up, it won't be a year obsolete before we
come on line. Also, the OpenBSD port to sparc64 is only a month old at
this point, and we need to do some testing on our own to see how stable
it really is. If it doesn't meet our requirements, the Pentium (or
AMD clone) option will likely win out.
I've sent Email to Dan Cross saying that our previous luke warm interest
in the two UltraSparc machines he was offering us has suddenly turned
into rather intense interest. These would be great development machines
for the OpenBSD project.
We are looking for a cheap or free Pentium machine that we can also use
for the OpenBSD project. We'd like to find something at least 200 MHz.
More is better, but this would not be a production machine at this point.
We want to get newer faster modems and probably a newer better terminal
server.
I think that's most of it.
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steve
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response 134 of 181:
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Nov 4 07:06 UTC 2001 |
Yup.
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tsty
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response 135 of 181:
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Nov 4 08:17 UTC 2001 |
... and teh sun has set?
/// awh, shit!
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carson
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response 136 of 181:
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Nov 4 09:05 UTC 2001 |
Kudos to everyone; it looks like a workable plan, and I am anxious
to see how it all shakes down.
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lk
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response 137 of 181:
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Nov 4 15:48 UTC 2001 |
I have an Annex III terminal server sitting around and which Grex is
welcome to have -- if that counts as "newer better".
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janc
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response 138 of 181:
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Nov 4 18:16 UTC 2001 |
I believe it does, yes. However, we should get the opinion from someone who
knows a bit more about terminal servers than I do.
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cross
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response 139 of 181:
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Nov 4 22:23 UTC 2001 |
Aww shucks; this means I need to take the train to Bensenhurst and put
those Suns in boxes.... Whadda pain. :-) Jan, I'll send the machines
off as soon as I can; probably sometime in the next week. You just
want the Ultra's, right? Not the Sun4m machines?
Again, I recommend using x86 hardware due to the upgradability and
performance, and especially if you're going to use OpenBSD; I think
the Ultra port is just too immature at the moment (and besides, it
won't do SMP, so the second processor in the Ultra 2 is going to be
unusable!).
OpenBSD is good stuff, but you'll have to hack it up a bit more than
FreeBSD. Oh well, c'est la vie.
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jp2
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response 140 of 181:
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Nov 4 23:23 UTC 2001 |
This response has been erased.
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tsty
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response 141 of 181:
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Nov 4 23:34 UTC 2001 |
hmmmmmmm, that would not be a desirable outcome.
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cross
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response 142 of 181:
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Nov 4 23:45 UTC 2001 |
Waitasec, doesn't M-Net already run FreeBSD? So if grex runs OpenBSD,
then your concern is implicitly addressed, right?
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jp2
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response 143 of 181:
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Nov 4 23:58 UTC 2001 |
This response has been erased.
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cross
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response 144 of 181:
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Nov 5 00:03 UTC 2001 |
Actually, TOPS-20 is a really nice operating system. Under modern
simulators, it even runs pretty quickly. However, I doubt many of
the grex staff members want to learn PDP-10 assembler and the COMND
JSYS to write utilities. Note that it isn't fun, but dealing with
18-bit addresses and 36 bit words is real culture shock after years
of Unix on pow2 machines.
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jp2
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response 145 of 181:
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Nov 5 00:10 UTC 2001 |
This response has been erased.
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keesan
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response 146 of 181:
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Nov 5 00:25 UTC 2001 |
I think Marcus said that he would be interested in the other Sun machines to
do things like e-mail. Ask Marcus, or someone else who was at the meeting
please confirm for Dan. Marcus's idea of perfect seems to be to have a
different computer for each thing that grex is doing.
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devnull
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response 147 of 181:
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Nov 5 02:28 UTC 2001 |
Re #129: even if grex ends up running an os that has kqueue, I suspect
it might be best to avoid kqueue and use sockets, so that if grex changes
again, less porting work well be required.
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mdw
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response 148 of 181:
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Nov 5 03:27 UTC 2001 |
TOPS-10 & 20 might be entertaining, especially if we could get ahold of
some of the original software Compuserve used. We didn't discuss this
at the meeting, but we did discuss using Hercules+OS/390, taking "jail"
to its logical conclusion and giving everyone their own emulated PDP-11
running 7th edition Unix, going to a 100% web based system (including
mail, party), or admitting Bill Gates has won and going to a solution
based on Windows NT+DCOM+distributed clients on people's home machines.
Well, more precisely, I proposed each of these, and got booed down.
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jp2
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response 149 of 181:
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Nov 5 03:31 UTC 2001 |
This response has been erased.
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remmers
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response 150 of 181:
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Nov 5 15:30 UTC 2001 |
Hm. The Ford Motor Company once paid me pretty good money to
program in TOPS20 assembler some years back. If Grex decides
to go that route, I suppose I could refresh my skills. I'm
not holding my breath, though. :)
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cross
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response 151 of 181:
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Nov 5 20:12 UTC 2001 |
Regarding #148; Well, TOPS-10 is a very different beast from TOPS-20.
Most of the emulators aren't quite there yet for doing newer versions
of TOPS-20 (newer here is obviously relative), since a KL processor
is required. TOPS-10 up through nearly the last release seems to work.
I suppose getting OS/390 would be difficult, since it's a pricey item
(and it's called z/OS now), but would be interesting. VM/370 running
on Hercules would be kind of neat.
I actually really like the idea of everyone logging into their own
emulated PDP-11 running 7th Edition; probably the last real version of
Unix ever made. You might run into some porting difficulties, though....
There's also RSTS if you go that route.
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gull
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response 152 of 181:
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Nov 5 21:38 UTC 2001 |
Re #129: The telnet queue exists to limit network bandwidth use
(crudely), not processor load, I think.
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cross
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response 153 of 181:
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Nov 5 23:24 UTC 2001 |
Regarding #152; I thought it existed due to a shortage of available
PTY's. Has anyone ever actually *measured* network utilitization?
It'd be silly to invest effort in limiting it if it wasn't a limiting
factor.
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mcnally
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response 154 of 181:
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Nov 5 23:36 UTC 2001 |
ptys can be increased with nothing more than a kernel rebuild and a
MAKEDEV, so I doubt the reason was an actual pty shortage.
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cross
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response 155 of 181:
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Nov 5 23:52 UTC 2001 |
Regarding #154; According to the grex staff pages, it was done because
the system got too slow when too many people logged in at once. Seems
like that problem goes away with a better computer. Without actually
measuring the utilization of the network link, I think it's a mistake
to say that the queuing telnetd `solves' any problem related to network
over-utilization.
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