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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 547 responses total. |
dpc
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response 53 of 547:
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Mar 3 21:37 UTC 2003 |
A lot of thought has gone into this list. It looks good to me,
too.
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jhudson
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response 54 of 547:
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Mar 3 22:07 UTC 2003 |
Re 45: if two floppies, the second DOES NOT back up the first.
The only purpose for floppies on servers these days is
interruption of the boot controler, and only the first one
is bootable anyway.
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keesan
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response 55 of 547:
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Mar 3 22:34 UTC 2003 |
My CMOS has a setting to switch A: and B:, would that help?
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cross
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response 56 of 547:
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Mar 3 22:36 UTC 2003 |
No, because there's no point in doing it. If grex's floppy drive dies
(why do they even *need* a floppy drive, by the way? Just boot off the
CD-ROM), the correct way to fix it is to go to the store and buy a new
one, and chuck the old one in the nearest trashcan. Not pull out bubble
gum and string and coax it into ``working.''
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gull
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response 57 of 547:
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Mar 3 23:44 UTC 2003 |
I suspect they're installing a floppy because floppy drives are really
cheap, and every once in a while it's handy to have one. That's why we
ordered them on the machines at work.
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keesan
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response 58 of 547:
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Mar 4 00:34 UTC 2003 |
We have been quite succesful in doing things the 'incorrect way' and recycling
used equipment rather than using the trashcan. Have not needed any bubblegum.
Cleaning a floppy drive every few years is probably less time consuming than
a trip to the store.
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cross
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response 59 of 547:
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Mar 4 01:55 UTC 2003 |
Cleaning a floppy drive for two people who like to spend their time doing
such things is less time consuming. Taking a system with >45,000 accounts
offline for an hour to take out the floppy drive and clean it is probably
a lot more time consuming, since you're no longer just wasting two people's
time.
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keesan
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response 60 of 547:
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Mar 4 11:58 UTC 2003 |
Does it take an hour to clean a floppy drive? There are cleaning diskettes
that you can run without taking out the drive.
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scott
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response 61 of 547:
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Mar 4 13:59 UTC 2003 |
Sure, but then somebody has to *buy* a cleaning diskette and make sure it will
be easily available 2 years from now when we actually need it.
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gull
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response 62 of 547:
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Mar 4 14:01 UTC 2003 |
I think we all appreciate that you're trying to save Grex money, Sindi,
but I think the decision has already been made to use new hardware this
time. Our system administrators are volunteers, and if they don't want
to spend their time cleaning floppy drives and otherwise trying to nurse
elderly hardware back to health I think we should respect that.
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keesan
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response 63 of 547:
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Mar 4 15:55 UTC 2003 |
I already said that I think STeve should do this however he prefers. I
thought we were talking theory here. I don't throw out my clothing or dishes
when they need cleaning.
And I do have two floppy drives in all my computers, which is handy when one
needs cleaning (every 3-4 years, with heavy daily use).
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janc
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response 64 of 547:
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Mar 5 04:59 UTC 2003 |
You make heavy daily use of your floppy drive? I'm not sure I've ever
used the floppy drive in my current computer.
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remmers
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response 65 of 547:
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Mar 5 13:04 UTC 2003 |
Floppies are a dying media format. Current trend is for them to be
optional rather than standard equipment.
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gull
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response 66 of 547:
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Mar 5 14:41 UTC 2003 |
I used them fairly heavily until I started networking everything
together. Now it's rare for me to use one. When I have to I'm struck
by how small, slow, and unreliable they are.
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robh
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response 67 of 547:
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Mar 5 18:02 UTC 2003 |
I actually still use mine a fair amount, for carrying files between
home and my two workplaces.
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drew
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response 68 of 547:
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Mar 5 19:32 UTC 2003 |
I use mine to carry small stuff back and forth to a friend's place. Anything
huge gets burned to a CD.
I did indeed see 512M compact flash cards at Best Buy - retail for $179. This
is almost as big as a CDROM, and costs not all that much more than a top o'the
line burner. Advantage: no moving parts. Possible drawback: I don't know
whether there's a hard write-protect switch.
The idea of booting from CDR or CF is that the boot media should contain only
the memory resident kernel, plus a .gz of the root filesystem to be used. It
should expand to at least a gigabyte, possibly two depending on how good the
compression is. In this manner, the system should run blindingly fast with
most of it on a Ramdisk, and hard drives only used where absolutely needed.
In addition, you get proof against root system corruption, as whatever hacks
are committed get undone with a simple reboot.
As for CF slowing down other devices, most modern boards come with two IDE
chains, and besides, the hard drives are to be Scuzzy.
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gull
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response 69 of 547:
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Mar 5 19:36 UTC 2003 |
I don't think CF cards have a hardware write-protect switch. At least,
I've never seen one that had one.
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keesan
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response 70 of 547:
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Mar 5 19:49 UTC 2003 |
What is grex planning to use a floppy drive for?
Most of the files that I produce are translations of under 20K and they fit
nicely on floppy disks. I use one disk per translation agency. My 360K disks
are 95% reliable (I lose maybe 1-2 per year). I don't trust the higher
density ones, they are always going bad. I move files between computers on
the 720K disks. We have several computers at each of three locations. This
is quicker and easier than uploading and downloading via grex or an ISP.
Most of our DOS files fit on 720K disks. I have a little file splitting
program that I have used on 2M files (such as a Linux distribution).
A page of text, single spaced, is about 2K. (page = screenful).
I don't recall ever having a floppy drive go bad, they just get dirty and
won't read all the disks after a few years. We have been given computers with
bad floppy drives (they will do a dir but won't read a file). To replace them
you remove the monitor (unless it is a tower), unscrew a few screws, remove
a cover, unscrew a few more screws, unplug two cables, replace the drive, and
reverse the process. Total time perhaps five minutes. Before actually
replacing the drive you can plug in the new one and make sure it fixes the
problem.
In 50 Borders computers that were really heavily used for many years and were
full of large dust bunnies there were a lot of bad floppy drives. Perhaps
the dust causes them to overheat. It might be a good idea to vacuum out the
grex computer once a year. You take them outside and blow the dust out.
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pvn
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response 71 of 547:
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Mar 6 08:52 UTC 2003 |
Just some random thoughts.
IBM is no longer in the drive manufacturing biz and hasn't been for
some time now. They are sweet drives and stand up to lots of abuse
and it sure wasn't for technical reasons IBM is out of that biz.
Be careful of older 18G drives tho-, (sold as 'new' in 3rd party
channels).
Adaptec is having financial problems, I seems to recall they just
laid off a lot of people recently. It kinda doesn't matter if you
don't expect support in the future anyway, but kinda makes you wonder
what manufacturing shortcuts might have taken place in the recent
past.
Nothing bad to say about AMD CPUs - more integer 'pute bang for the
buck. (We are talking about delivering text to the Internet over
a slow pipe, not massive floating point calculations).
I'd like to see some analysis of the current hardware and where its
bottlenecks are. Seems to me that the huge theoretical performance
allowed by Adaptec/fast scsi drives is still limited by the transfer
rate of the PCI bus. Thus the delivery of little chunks of data that
constitute web browsing of raw ascii text (the primary function of grex)
might be equally well served by much larger cheaper IDE disks. And
its easy to get 16 IDE disks in one system. (You were talking only
two screamer scsi drives right?) Fat disk trying to send data to
slim pipe? It doesn't matter if the PCI controller can read the
screaming disk as 166/320 in theory if the best it can deliver is 66
and with most MBs 33.
More memory is good. Its cheap and a whole lot faster than even the
fastest disk.
Don't just buy a spare identical motherboard which sits on a shelf
gathering dust until it is needed. Take the next step. Invest
the little extra in case/pws/cpu/memory and put it online at the
same time. Look at clustering/HA/failover/distributed computing.
Seems to me there are a number of well developed applications.
Look at what you are doing. Sure writing a post to the disk is
atomic but reading sure isn't. There is no reason that reading an
item via a web page (probably the vast majority funtionality) couldn't
be a distributed task.
Why BSD? I used to be a BSD bigot where serious stuff should be done
on it. But now Linux, with major players spending tons of bucks, is
where everything is happening and backported to BSD et al. With
linux you have things like MOSIX.
Any thoughts of approaching name hardware manufacturers to donate
for the tax right off? I seems to recall that it has been mentioned
in the past. Why spend yer own money in the first place? So you don't
get the latest and greatest, but you get it for 'free'?
Just my 2-cents worth.
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gull
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response 72 of 547:
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Mar 6 15:23 UTC 2003 |
Pvn, care to elaborate how you get 16 IDE disks in one system? At two
disks per channel you'd need eight controllers to do that. One will be
on the motherboard, but that still leaves seven, and most machines just
don't have that many PCI slots.
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jep
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response 73 of 547:
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Mar 6 20:31 UTC 2003 |
M-Net looked into asking for donations for a server, several years
ago. I don't recall Grex ever doing so.
I don't think processing power will be any problem with a modern PC-
based system. M-Net has never had problems processing the amount of
data they required, and Grex is not that substantially different. M-
Net is still very much usable with load averages into the 20s. In
fact, as a user, one doesn't even notice such loads. I don't think we
need to worry about distributed computing just now.
Distributing the computing load would add complexity to a process
that's already going to be complicated for the staff. I'd hope someday
we can get a mail server, but let's let staff get the new computer up
and running first. Then they can add frills. We don't have to have it
all at once.
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gull
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response 74 of 547:
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Mar 6 21:26 UTC 2003 |
Re #72: Err, sorry, two will be on the motherboard, generally. Still,
machines with six PCI slots aren't terribly common, and you'll use up a lot
of precious IRQs...
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jhudson
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response 75 of 547:
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Mar 7 16:26 UTC 2003 |
Good point. SCSI needed.
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mdw
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response 76 of 547:
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Mar 7 23:25 UTC 2003 |
Grex has had equipment fundraisers for hardware before. Since we've
previously gone with trailing edge CPU's, previous fundraisers have been
for memory, hard disks, etc.
I don't know if IDE commonly supports overlapped seeks yet. With only 2
devices per channel, there of course less advantage to overlapping
seeks, but all other things being equal, a 2 disk IDE chain that can't
do overlapped seeks is going to perform less well than a 2 disk SCSI
chain which can. With small block transfers, overlapped seeks and more
spindles per given capacity (ie, smaller drives) may be more important
to us than transfer rates.
There are 2, 4, and 6 channel IDE controllers. A 6 channel IDE
controller can attach up to 12 IE disks using one PCI slot. I've heard
people claim that some of these mega channel IDE based systems are very
fast disk machines, and that it even makes more sense to do software
RAID than hardware, on account of the CPU having so much more memory to
buffer things. I don't know how much truth there is in all this.
One difference that is likely to be important to grex is that SCSI
drives today typically go into "server" machines. IDE drives available
via retail channels are most commonly going into desktop machines.
There is a real split in the PC x86 world between server, desktop, and
home machines, with a corresponding descent in quality (and reduction in
reliability) between the three. This is a recent development, so I'm
afraid Sindi won't have seen this in any of the machines she sees.
Since SCSI drives mainly go into server class machines, there is a
chance they'll be more rugged and reliable.
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tonster
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response 77 of 547:
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Mar 8 02:51 UTC 2003 |
Looking at the prices you guys are looking to pay for stuff, it really
seems like you're spending a hell of a lot more money than you need to.
You can get a 54X CD-ROM brand new for $28 at Sky-Tech in Ann Arbor.
And it's not some cheap knock-off drive. Floppy drives cost no more
than $14.95 locally, and you don't have to pay shipping. A lot of those
costs that were listed really are inflated for what you're getting.
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