Well, here's how we did our 525GB server for $4200 last December (would've been 600GB, but we decided to go RAID5.)
Key parts, both hardware & software:
PIII-933
256MB PC133 SDRAM
4 Promise ATA/100 controllers
8 IBM 75GB Deskstars
3c905CTX (We don't have Gigabit yet)
Linux 2.4.x kernel
ReiserFS
Big F*cking Case
We went this way because of the nature of the files to be stored (mean size=120MB, many over 200MB), and their purpose (download once, read a few times, delete.)
NFS read times are around 20-25 MB/sec, just fine for us.
A few points:
Use only ONE drive per bus -- remember, this is IDE.
Get a Big F*cking Case (tm) with at least a 350W power supply -- you're going to get some serious heat from 9 drives (the 9th is a 45GB drive, our boot device), so you'll need some pretty decent cooling going on.
There is a hardware hack (check Tom's Hardware) that'll make the Promise ATA/100 controller into a IDE RAID controller -- try at your own risk. We didn't feel like messing with it.
If I get some pictures up, I'll post the URL later. The Qu+xum has spoken. Nyaaah!
As i live in.nl, there are a lot of things here i could get arrested for in the USA then.
Then watch out -- Adobe might just sick Interpol on ya; see also Jon Johansen, DeCSS.
I hope the Russian Government/Embassy has the $$$ and the gonads to support our intrepid hacker friend throughout his legal ordeal -- just so I can see the DMCA go down in flames.:) The Qu+xum has spoken. Nyaaah!
Unless I'm completely mistaken, I just downloaded the Windows XP preview and get to use it for 180 days because it's a beta. There is no subscription involved because when those 180 days expire, I have the option to go back to Win2000.
And how much do you want to wager that you'll have to rebuild it when trying to revert back to W2k destroys your registry and half your apps?
Or use the Linux side of my box.
Better get used to it. Of course, I wouldn't be the least surprised when the regression buggers up your boot record. I know, it shouldn't even touch it, but hey, we all know M$ would do anything to cripple Linux....
And as for the monthly subscription fee, that's nothing new -- DEC and a bunch of the other oldies were doing that 20+ years ago. Innovation my hairy arse.
i once installed freebsd and to my disgust i had to ftp every fucking application, compile the source and install the binaries.
I'm going to assume you're familiar with RPMs (maybe this is a bad assumption.)
Ever tried playing the game of dependencies with RPMs? # rpm -U foo-2.75-1.i386.rpm
foo-2.75-1 requires bar-4.05
foo-2.75-1 requires baz-4.05
# rpm -i bar-4.05-2.i386.rpm
bar-4.05-2 would break dependency of quux-0.91
FreeBSD ports tend to take care of these for you. If a dependency is missing, it grabs the distfile and builds that one too. Breakages are also a bit more rare (in my experience, YMMV).
You don't wanna build from source, you say? Grab the package then and play the dependency game again.
And if you don't wanna ftp the distfiles or packages, buy the damn CDs. $40 is still nothing compared to whatever load M$ is gonna bring forth.
Life's even better when your employer pays for it (University of Pittsburgh.)
I drive 10 minutes to the Park'n'Ride, spend an hour on the bus one way with my radio, and leave the road rage, potholes, and piss-poor parking to the Port Authority of Allegheny County.* Anyone who's driven on our wonderful Pittsburgh-area roads knows exactly what I mean.
And it's even cheaper than moving 6 miles to Allegheny County and quadrupling my taxes.
Now, to get back on-topic...
I submit that CD-Rs are getting more expensive because of a request from the RIAA & MPAA. Full-length albums, and hours of MP3s, are being burned and easily passed around.
Full-length movies are being burned on CD, thus undercutting the DVD market.
This is all speculation (read: conspiracy theory), so take it with a mega-grain of salt.
*-that's probably the most alliterative clause I've ever written.:) Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
The web surfing and email ability is mentioned, provided you have access to a phone line (and, presumably, some sort of ISP). How many of these people have telephones? Can they afford ISP service? There's more to getting "online" than simply having the hardware.
My 2:
Assume a primarily agricultural nation. How would its citizens get voice/data access?
Nationalized telecom industry; it's the only entity that can afford it, or...
A multi-billionaire fits the cost. Riiiight.
Now, what would be cheaper...
Running copper/fibre/strings with tin cans throughout your nation, or...
Set up radio/cellular/satellite towers in several places?
Now that wireless has come of age (pretty much), towers would seem cheaper than running cable. The problem would be running power to the towers.
Access. I'm not aware of any NTFS drivers for Linux. So, if you want to setup a dual-boot system, you wouldn't be able access your NTFS partition while in Linux.
Well, it can be mounted read-only, which has saved me several times when an NT/2000 machine went down. Mount it up -o ro, tar cf/home/freespace/nt.tar/nt/*, and away you go.
What I'd really love to see is the reverse: ext2 and reiserfs support in NT/2000. Does anyone see it happening anytime soon -- or is it around already? Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
Has anyone else had printing problems migrating 2.2.x to 2.4.x?
Nope, but we've had some autofs problems with our Solaris machines trying to automount (and failing) NFS-exported directories on RH6.2/Linux 2.4.x kernels. I think it was related to nfslock. The latest NFS-utils RPM from RedHat fixed that.
We're using 2.4.x for UDMA, USB, and ReiserFS...so 2.4.4 will be deployed almost everywhere by Monday afternoon.:)
Let's see in what way we can publicize DMCA in a way non slashdot-freedom-advocates can understand. Their multitude of voices can silence this if they look up from their TV's long enough.
Or better yet, find a case where the DMCA comes back to bite the [RI|MP]AA on the a$$.
e.g.; If Micro$oft had known ahead of time that the UCITA would cause them to lose an entire state's worth of business (see Micro$oft Passport not offered to Maryland residents), they pro'lly wouldn't have supported it in the first place.
Make the [RI|MP]AA regret they supported the DMCA, and it'll get overturned Really F*cking Quick.
I thought in America we believed in innocent until proven guilty and in due process.
Heh. I'm reminded of the time a few years ago when, I think it was Texas, declared their State Educational System Unconstitutional and had to rebuild the whole damn thing.
Apparently, they still haven't gotten it right. Sic the ACLU on the school district to really draw some attention.
Now as a side-note, this is what I figure is a checklist for profiling students, and my status when I was in Norwin High School, 1993-96.
Unpopular : yes
Non-athletic : yes
Antisocial : yes
Extra-curriculars : very few
Counter-cultural : partially
Computer-geek : yes
High IQ/low marks : yes
Lack of school spirit: yes
Access to weapons : yes
If I were there today, my ass would be chucked out faster than a speeding Athlon. At least due to Pennsylvania's Sunshine Law, I could have a fully public hearing with several newspeople in front of the school board at my expulsion hearing.
"Send lawyers, guns, and money...the shit has hit the fan." -- Warren Zevon
The idea here is to have several hundred hamsters in several hundred wheels (with ratcheting action, to keep them all spinning the same direction), all of which belt-drive several hundred small generators (those tiny motors you can get at Radio Shack) and wire them in series or parallel (I don't remember enough EE to make the distinction, but it's trivial anyway to feed it through a transformer.)
The power generated should be nearly equivalent of a Lego Mindstorm motor...the part of delivering the power to create motion is left to the reader, or at least to the next person who replies to this post. Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
If UW already has "The Why Files" trademarked (which I think they do), then tough titty for Fox unless they already trademarked "The [a-Az-Z] Files." Which they didn't.
But of course, Fox has to whine like little babies since they aren't getting their way.
The only time wireless'd be any good is if you have a laptop, aren't concerned with security, and take your laptop with you to the loo.:)
For God's sake, if you are concerned about security, don't broadcast your messages over the air! If you're f'n paranoid, use fibre, as it has no magnetic field around it to be intercepted.
If you really want to be secure, turn off your computer, use a removable drive, take it out, lock it in a safe, and take the network cable out of the machine when you leave. That way, there is no physical nor electronic access to your data. Simple. Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
[warning -- off-topic]
If Consumer Reports did a test on a MS product and published the report. Would MS take them on in court?
It wouldn't be the first time; recall about 6 years ago when Isuzu hauled Consumer Union's* arse into court, after CR had a report about Troopers flipping over.
The difference was that Isuzu was right in suing them; I don't recall the details, but CU had done something to destabilize the Troopers during testing.
We know if CU did tests on M$ products and compared them to Linux/Unix products; and that M$ came out significantly ahead, then there would be some misinformation going around. Can you say "MindCraft"?
> ALL YOU DOS ARE BELOG TO uS
> fucking god damn lameness filter
You're complaining because the lameness filter is doing its job?
Obviously it isn't.:)
Getting back on-topic...
Why do most DB servers suck? Because they are running so much unnecessary [censored in Australia] that real performance slows down to a slug on Valium®.
This is not just Winblows that suffers from this (although they tend to be most guilty of such transgressions). A lot of DB servers I've seen running Linux or FreeBSD were set up by barely-knowledgable admins who basically set them up out-of-the-box and do almost nothing. They still run ftp/telnet/httpd/God-knows-what-else-d with the default kernels.
No! Bad l@m3 admin! No biscuit!
A properly config'd kernel with all unnecessary services turned off (see/etc/inetd.conf,/etc/rc3.d, etc.) should be required for a decent DB server. Trust me, it's not that hard to get a kernel from kernel.org, toss it in/usr/src/linux, and make menuconfig. Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
No email, no "unclean" sites, no web radio, no TV, no music. None of it. Where's the market?
For the server vendors to make firewalls/filters/sniffers for all links coming into Australia. The government would pro'lly buy MILLION$ worth of equipment and run Win2k on it to sniff every packet going into/coming out of the country.
Easily circumventable.:)
But who's to say there won't be a Net Gestapo to go around to all the companies and universities to snoop around the server room and grab a copy of the logs? (Forgive me for any ignorance of any existing Australian laws, but the government's ignorance must rank above mine.)
The colonies already had an army at the time they united to form a union.
And were getting their colonial asses whooped on by the Redcoats. It took several semi-organised armies (read: militias) to really pick it up. Watch The Patriot.
Someone else on this thread also said something about not wanting J. Random Mad Millionaire have an arsenal of nuclear weapons (or just one, for that matter). Who knows when a missile would come out of Redmond, WA and hit Transmeta?
So, getting back on topic, who determines what is "adult-oriented"? If I used the word "fuck" in this post, would it be "adult-oriented" and therefore not be seen in South Australia? Will the following line be censored?
"FUCK THE SOUTH AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT!"
(Let's hope I don't have to go to Adelaide et. al. anytime soon.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Key parts, both hardware & software:
We went this way because of the nature of the files to be stored (mean size=120MB, many over 200MB), and their purpose (download once, read a few times, delete.)
NFS read times are around 20-25 MB/sec, just fine for us.
A few points:
- Use only ONE drive per bus -- remember, this is IDE.
- Get a Big F*cking Case (tm) with at least a 350W power supply -- you're going to get some serious heat from 9 drives (the 9th is a 45GB drive, our boot device), so you'll need some pretty decent cooling going on.
- There is a hardware hack (check Tom's Hardware) that'll make the Promise ATA/100 controller into a IDE RAID controller -- try at your own risk. We didn't feel like messing with it.
If I get some pictures up, I'll post the URL later.The Qu+xum has spoken. Nyaaah!
As i live in .nl, there are a lot of things here i could get arrested for in the USA then.
:)
Then watch out -- Adobe might just sick Interpol on ya; see also Jon Johansen, DeCSS.
I hope the Russian Government/Embassy has the $$$ and the gonads to support our intrepid hacker friend throughout his legal ordeal -- just so I can see the DMCA go down in flames.
The Qu+xum has spoken. Nyaaah!
It kinda looks like...
READY. FASTLOAD
The Qu+xum has spoken. Nyaaah!
Unless I'm completely mistaken, I just downloaded the Windows XP preview and get to use it for 180 days because it's a beta. There is no subscription involved because when those 180 days expire, I have the option to go back to Win2000.
And how much do you want to wager that you'll have to rebuild it when trying to revert back to W2k destroys your registry and half your apps?
Or use the Linux side of my box.
Better get used to it. Of course, I wouldn't be the least surprised when the regression buggers up your boot record. I know, it shouldn't even touch it, but hey, we all know M$ would do anything to cripple Linux....
And as for the monthly subscription fee, that's nothing new -- DEC and a bunch of the other oldies were doing that 20+ years ago. Innovation my hairy arse.
Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
i once installed freebsd and to my disgust i had to ftp every fucking application, compile the source and install the binaries.
I'm going to assume you're familiar with RPMs (maybe this is a bad assumption.)
Ever tried playing the game of dependencies with RPMs?
# rpm -U foo-2.75-1.i386.rpm
foo-2.75-1 requires bar-4.05
foo-2.75-1 requires baz-4.05
# rpm -i bar-4.05-2.i386.rpm
bar-4.05-2 would break dependency of quux-0.91
FreeBSD ports tend to take care of these for you. If a dependency is missing, it grabs the distfile and builds that one too. Breakages are also a bit more rare (in my experience, YMMV).
You don't wanna build from source, you say? Grab the package then and play the dependency game again.
And if you don't wanna ftp the distfiles or packages, buy the damn CDs. $40 is still nothing compared to whatever load M$ is gonna bring forth.
Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
See this previous /. article:
Microsoft's Passport: No Marylanders, Thanks
Does this mean that the Maryland residents are now no longer to join MSDN?
Doesn't this violate some labor laws? Or at least some anti-trust or interstate commerce acts?
Will M$ tell Maryland to repeal the UCITA that they tried to get passed in the first place?
Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
Life is good w/o a commute. :)
:)
Life's even better when your employer pays for it (University of Pittsburgh.)
I drive 10 minutes to the Park'n'Ride, spend an hour on the bus one way with my radio, and leave the road rage, potholes, and piss-poor parking to the Port Authority of Allegheny County.* Anyone who's driven on our wonderful Pittsburgh-area roads knows exactly what I mean.
And it's even cheaper than moving 6 miles to Allegheny County and quadrupling my taxes.
Now, to get back on-topic...
I submit that CD-Rs are getting more expensive because of a request from the RIAA & MPAA. Full-length albums, and hours of MP3s, are being burned and easily passed around.
Full-length movies are being burned on CD, thus undercutting the DVD market.
This is all speculation (read: conspiracy theory), so take it with a mega-grain of salt.
*-that's probably the most alliterative clause I've ever written.
Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
My 2:
Assume a primarily agricultural nation. How would its citizens get voice/data access?
Now, what would be cheaper...
Now that wireless has come of age (pretty much), towers would seem cheaper than running cable. The problem would be running power to the towers.
Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
Access. I'm not aware of any NTFS drivers for Linux. So, if you want to setup a dual-boot system, you wouldn't be able access your NTFS partition while in Linux.
/home/freespace/nt.tar /nt/*, and away you go.
Well, it can be mounted read-only, which has saved me several times when an NT/2000 machine went down. Mount it up -o ro, tar cf
What I'd really love to see is the reverse: ext2 and reiserfs support in NT/2000. Does anyone see it happening anytime soon -- or is it around already?
Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
Has anyone else had printing problems migrating 2.2.x to 2.4.x?
:)
Nope, but we've had some autofs problems with our Solaris machines trying to automount (and failing) NFS-exported directories on RH6.2/Linux 2.4.x kernels. I think it was related to nfslock. The latest NFS-utils RPM from RedHat fixed that.
We're using 2.4.x for UDMA, USB, and ReiserFS...so 2.4.4 will be deployed almost everywhere by Monday afternoon.
Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
Let's see in what way we can publicize DMCA in a way non slashdot-freedom-advocates can understand. Their multitude of voices can silence this if they look up from their TV's long enough.
Or better yet, find a case where the DMCA comes back to bite the [RI|MP]AA on the a$$.
e.g.; If Micro$oft had known ahead of time that the UCITA would cause them to lose an entire state's worth of business (see Micro$oft Passport not offered to Maryland residents), they pro'lly wouldn't have supported it in the first place.
Make the [RI|MP]AA regret they supported the DMCA, and it'll get overturned Really F*cking Quick.
Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
Heh. I'm reminded of the time a few years ago when, I think it was Texas, declared their State Educational System Unconstitutional and had to rebuild the whole damn thing.
Apparently, they still haven't gotten it right. Sic the ACLU on the school district to really draw some attention.
Now as a side-note, this is what I figure is a checklist for profiling students, and my status when I was in Norwin High School, 1993-96.
If I were there today, my ass would be chucked out faster than a speeding Athlon. At least due to Pennsylvania's Sunshine Law, I could have a fully public hearing with several newspeople in front of the school board at my expulsion hearing.
"Send lawyers, guns, and money...the shit has hit the fan." -- Warren Zevon
Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
The idea here is to have several hundred hamsters in several hundred wheels (with ratcheting action, to keep them all spinning the same direction), all of which belt-drive several hundred small generators (those tiny motors you can get at Radio Shack) and wire them in series or parallel (I don't remember enough EE to make the distinction, but it's trivial anyway to feed it through a transformer.)
The power generated should be nearly equivalent of a Lego Mindstorm motor...the part of delivering the power to create motion is left to the reader, or at least to the next person who replies to this post.
Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
If UW already has "The Why Files" trademarked (which I think they do), then tough titty for Fox unless they already trademarked "The [a-Az-Z] Files." Which they didn't.
But of course, Fox has to whine like little babies since they aren't getting their way.
"WAAAH!!! I WANT UW'S DOMAIN NAME!"
Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
That's why napster's so great - it derives its benefit from the fact that practically everyone is hooked in and their files are entrally indexed.
:)
Which is the whole legal issue -- there is a knowledge of what files are available at any given time, and stored on a central server.
This is why Gnutella (the network itself, not the outdated client) is much harder to monitor; there does not exist a central server with an index.
If you want to find more, set your TTL to a nice (not absurd) amount. Just hope all the links are >= T1.
Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
There's really no good reason that a default installation (of anything) can't be generally useful.
True, but serving up a database to hundreds if not thousands of users isn't exactly "general".
Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
The only time wireless'd be any good is if you have a laptop, aren't concerned with security, and take your laptop with you to the loo. :)
For God's sake, if you are concerned about security, don't broadcast your messages over the air! If you're f'n paranoid, use fibre, as it has no magnetic field around it to be intercepted.
If you really want to be secure, turn off your computer, use a removable drive, take it out, lock it in a safe, and take the network cable out of the machine when you leave. That way, there is no physical nor electronic access to your data. Simple.
Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
...in Riff's arsenal. You paying attention, Pete?
Seriously, at 20000m/s, that would probably sound-off like a siren. Probably not suitable for hunting.
Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
[warning -- off-topic] If Consumer Reports did a test on a MS product and published the report. Would MS take them on in court?
It wouldn't be the first time; recall about 6 years ago when Isuzu hauled Consumer Union's* arse into court, after CR had a report about Troopers flipping over.
The difference was that Isuzu was right in suing them; I don't recall the details, but CU had done something to destabilize the Troopers during testing.
We know if CU did tests on M$ products and compared them to Linux/Unix products; and that M$ came out significantly ahead, then there would be some misinformation going around. Can you say "MindCraft"?
* - publisher of Consumer Reports
Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
> ALL YOU DOS ARE BELOG TO uS
:)
/etc/inetd.conf, /etc/rc3.d, etc.) should be required for a decent DB server. Trust me, it's not that hard to get a kernel from kernel.org, toss it in /usr/src/linux, and make menuconfig.
> fucking god damn lameness filter
You're complaining because the lameness filter is doing its job?
Obviously it isn't.
Getting back on-topic...
Why do most DB servers suck? Because they are running so much unnecessary [censored in Australia] that real performance slows down to a slug on Valium®.
This is not just Winblows that suffers from this (although they tend to be most guilty of such transgressions). A lot of DB servers I've seen running Linux or FreeBSD were set up by barely-knowledgable admins who basically set them up out-of-the-box and do almost nothing. They still run ftp/telnet/httpd/God-knows-what-else-d with the default kernels.
No! Bad l@m3 admin! No biscuit!
A properly config'd kernel with all unnecessary services turned off (see
Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
I'm still not going to go out to get a PS2 just so I can play {FreeCiv|starlanes|xpat2|dopewars|xstella|etc.} That's why I have an old SparcStation.
:)
But if it runs Limewire...that's a different kettle of fish altogether.
Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
Here's the link: [click]
It doesn't come out as being too intelligible.
Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
No email, no "unclean" sites, no web radio, no TV, no music. None of it. Where's the market?
:)
For the server vendors to make firewalls/filters/sniffers for all links coming into Australia. The government would pro'lly buy MILLION$ worth of equipment and run Win2k on it to sniff every packet going into/coming out of the country.
Easily circumventable.
But who's to say there won't be a Net Gestapo to go around to all the companies and universities to snoop around the server room and grab a copy of the logs? (Forgive me for any ignorance of any existing Australian laws, but the government's ignorance must rank above mine.)
Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
Also from Norton; gdisk, part of the Norton/Symantec Ghost suite, supports wiping from 1 to 99 passes.
:)
Or if you don't mind waiting...reformat your system and put WinME on it -- it'll be completely trashed in about a month or so.
Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
The colonies already had an army at the time they united to form a union.
:)
And were getting their colonial asses whooped on by the Redcoats. It took several semi-organised armies (read: militias) to really pick it up. Watch The Patriot.
Someone else on this thread also said something about not wanting J. Random Mad Millionaire have an arsenal of nuclear weapons (or just one, for that matter). Who knows when a missile would come out of Redmond, WA and hit Transmeta?
So, getting back on topic, who determines what is "adult-oriented"? If I used the word "fuck" in this post, would it be "adult-oriented" and therefore not be seen in South Australia? Will the following line be censored?
"FUCK THE SOUTH AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT!"
(Let's hope I don't have to go to Adelaide et. al. anytime soon.
Thus sprach DrQu+xum.