I'd sure like to know how to make NFS faster. Right now, on my server, it SUCKS! Read speeds are good (though not great), but it can't write for crap. I can transfer files to/from the exact same directories using scp, and even with the encryption/decryption overhead I get right up to max LAN speed (Gbit network). But the NFS writes will crawl along at 1-2Mbps (yes, bit!) and often stall.
I've tried to find NFS tuning info, but most of the docs I've found mention the same few options that don't seem to be affecting anything. (Primarily wsize/rsize and jumbo frames.) I'm resigning myself to the potential need to start doing the extremely time-consuming tuning procedures I've found, but if anyone knows of something else to check I'd love to hear it! I've also thought about trying out SMB of all things...!
I have used NFS for a long time, and never noticed this behavior before. The only two things that changed recently is going from 100Mbps to 1Gbps (quite a while ago) and using Ubuntu on the desktop (pretty recently, used to use Slackware). I seldom wrote to the NFS drives, so I'm hard pressed to know just when the slowdown happened. The server is and always has been Slackware.
My grandmother died last month, and while I was staying with my aunt we went through boxes of old photos. Many of them people had long forgotten about, and quite a few - from around 1950 on back - were very difficult to even make things out, as they had slowly faded away. Not to mention the question of who gets which photo afterward.
With digital photos, I may have to more frequently keep up with them than regular printed photos, but both take maintenance to really last. I've asked my aunt to send me many of the photos so I can scan them in and distribute them to all the relatives. Even if one loses something, others will have it.
I *wish* my 17" and 19" LCD panels did 1600x1200! I love having the small fonts. My Dell laptops (C840s) have 1600x1200 native resolution on a roughly 15" FP. I can still read things just fine on them and love having that much info on the screen at once. I *hate* having to stack windows!
Unfortunately, it appears for an external FP you have to get up to 21" before you get 1600x1200, so my desktop system has three FPs on it (just because I could!;). A 19" in the center, and a 17" to either side. Using the desktop metaphor, I compare this to the difference between the crappy desks in the older buildings in college, where you could hardly balance your notebook let alone a textbook on the small fold-out platform, and having a whole table to spread things out on. The high res on the laptop lets me do that even with just a single display.
Granted, my eyes appear to be better than many, even though I do wear glasses (astigmatism). My coworkers often comment that they can't see a darn thing on my laptop!
As others have mentioned, the CPU is definitely unimportant. I bought a Dell Poweredge server a few years back with a 2GHz P4. I set up p4-clockmod, and the thing has never come off the 300MHz minimum speed during normal operation.
The most trouble I've had is keeping it all cool. Between the P4 and all the drives, a fair bit of heat is generated. Stopping the drives when not in use would help there, but then I've always been concerned that the extra starts would increase the failure rate. The way I figure, if they are left running everything stablizes and should live longer than repeated powering on of the motor and the heating/cooling of the drive. So I've never tried setting up power-down. Perhaps that's an inaccurate assumption on my part.
When I lived in an apartment, I put the server in a closet that had the sliding doors. Set it sideways, then left the doors open about 3-4" on both ends. The fans caused enough of a draft to pull cool air in one door and exhaust it out the other. Here in my house I have everything set up in a walk-in closet and things stay cool enough just by leaving the door open most of the time. During the summer, I do have a mini A/C unit in there so I don't have to cool the whole house.
I have been using NFS for a long time, and on the 100Mbps network I never really noticed any problems, although it was slower than other transfer methods. But now that I have 1Gbps to my desktop, it's really lousy. I've tried some tuning tricks, but so far no luck. Especially when writing to the server, NFS is abysmally slow compared to anything else, such as scp. I've considered trying some other filesystems, but haven't gotten around to it yet.
Do you *really* think all the crap going on in airports is doing any good?!
Little if any of it is really making a plane flight any safer than it was before. There are still people getting on planes with things they aren't supposed to. And so what if someone gets on with a box cutter? Now that the pilots are required to stay locked in the cockpit, all that person could do is injure/kill some passengers. And I doubt he'd get far at that, once other passengers figured out what was up.
And then we have some really bullshit rules. Grandma can't take her knitting needles along, but I can carry all the pens and pencils I want. Yeah, this really makes sense...
I wouldn't complain if I was just "inconvenienced". But when I have to show up HOURS ahead of my scheduled flight just to get to the terminal, when - after I've made it to the terminal early to insure an early seat selection (yeah, I usually fly Southwest) - I stand a chance of being dragged out of line for some TSA goon to paw through my carryons, when it's actually just about as fast for me to drive 500 miles as it is to fly to the same destination?!?
That is FAR from "inconvenienced". I don't know how you manage to get through in only 10-15 minutes more. I've never had that sort of experience.
I'm tired of the way we - the citizens and paying customers - are both treated as helpless waifs that can't fend for ourselves and simultaneously presumed guilty of some heinous act. That's why last summer when I headed off to visit relatives halfway across the country and on into Canada I drove the whole way. I didn't have to speak to a single "person of authority" the whole way, except for 30 seconds at the border crossing. (Not to mention, I would have paid MORE - about double! - for the priviledge of being abused by the TSA goons!)
I've been dabbling with it (can't quite bring myself to let go of Slackware on my laptop!) and have a comment on one of your items:
Multimedia support is close to non existant. I have source installed mplayer, dvd::rip and avidemux (And a few libraries they depend on). That brought multimedia up to par with my gentoo install altough much more hassle than gentoo.
At first it seemed this was the case to me as well, but I have found that many (all?) of the items in "multiverse" - including Mplayer, dvd libraries, etc - don't show up in the basic/default package installer. If I search there, either nothing appears or it shows up grayed out. If I switch to the "advanced" mode and search, everything shows up (with multiple versions even) and I can get it all installed. The only thing not available in the repository was libdvdcss (think that's the name) due to legal issues but libdvdread spit out some instructions when I ran mplayer on how to install that with a supplied shell script.
I was quite pleased - I have a 1GHz desktop leftover from work that I installed 5.10 on, and once I found the above got Mplayer working easily. In far less time (not to mention frustration) than I've ever spent before I was watching and ripping DVDs. Very nice. This machine is now probably destined to replace my "TV computer" out in the living room.
I haven't used it enough yet to comment on anything else, it seemed quite speedy enough to me considering the computer. I'm just about willing to install it on the laptop - that'll be the real test for me.
If only that were the case. Don't underestimate the ability of "the masses" to be uninformed!
I was reading stories from various sources on the riots in France with great interest. The story was seemingly being covered everywhere. But nearly two weeks after they had started, I was still finding people in my office who hadn't heard a single word about them.
Of course, these same people can quote every lame sports statistic in the known universe, so they have to be watching the news at some point. They just don't even hear the bits that don't "affect" them!
So all Sony needs is to hope that the bulk of their customers have TVs that never leave ESPN or HBO. And lately that doesn't seem to be much of a stretch!
Just putting a radiator outside won't work when it's hot outside, unless you get evaporation working for you. There are two ways that can be done - either flow your cooling water over a cooling tower (which means you'll then have to add measures to keep the cooling water clean, and trash-free, as well as replacing the water that evaporates) or add a spray pump to spray water on the outside of your sealed radiator.
Either way, the cooling fan will then cause evaporation to occur, which will lower the temperature of the cooling water. Unless it's extremely humid, you'll be able to get below outside air temp. But you will never get a whole lot below, so don't plan on running a 60 degree F cooling loop when it's 95F outside!
You would have much better success (although the initial cost is pretty stout) setting up a ground-source loop. Drill a well down, run a loop of PVC piping down the well, and flow your coolant through there. Provided you drill enough wells (I don't know the typical capacity per well right off) you'll be able to keep your coolant supply in the 60F - 70F range without too much trouble. This is what we (at work, I do HVAC control systems) have been putting in for quite a few schools lately. But it can take a LOT of wells, and at least in my area each well of roughly 20-30 ft deep will run you around $2,000.
AC units create temperature gradient thanks to the properties of refrigerant, specifically the fact that they change temperature drastically when compressed or expanded. That we use electric compressors in most units is only a convenience, they could be gas-driven (such as in a vehicle) or if you really want a workout, hook one up to a stationary bicycle!:) (It better be a SMALL compressor...!)
We use the same RSA/Cisco setup where I work. And no, you don't have to enter any other numbers. A few people still have the hard tokens, or key fobs, and they do have to enter the number plus pin. With the soft token, you can open it up in one window and see the same sort of numbers, but they are evidently fed into the VPN client automatically. All I enter is a 4-digit numeric PIN!
I haven't seen that particular style, but it most likely works like a window unit, except the hot air that would normally go outside is being dumped in the area above the drop ceiling.
Most buildings now use "plenum return" air, meaning there aren't return ducts to the main A/C units, they just suck air from above the ceiling. Each room has a grille in the ceiling that lets air from the room get back above the ceiling. This means the little A/C unit is effectively just dumping its heat into the air going back to the main A/C unit, in the same manner as your refrigerator at home.
If the main A/C is off (at night, on weekends, etc) then the Liebert just proceeds to heat the air above the ceiling. Unless the building is really small, or the room is surrounded by firewalls, it would take a long time to overheat, by which time the main A/C should be running again anyway.
This sort of thing might work in the ceiling at home, except that most attics get extremely hot during the summer, possibly exceeding the unit's operating temperature range.
First I tried one of the portable units. Two caveats with them:
1. Get one that has TWO ducts, these suck in air through one to cool the condenser ("outside") coil, then blow the hot air out the other. I got one that had just one, which means it uses some of the room air to cool the condenser. Problem is, in my closet, that meant enough air was being sucked into the closet from the rest of the house that the unit effectively never shut off. Not desirable.
2. Be careful where you vent the exhaust. Many models now have a pump that dumps the condensate over the condenser coil to help increase the cooling. This means the exhaust air can be VERY humid, and you probably don't want to just dump that into your attic. (Oops... I did that...) Especially if it's cool outside (thus the attic is cool) you may wind up with a lot of water collecting in the insulation. So vent it outside!
I decided I wasn't happy with the way the portable worked, so I actually installed a mini-split. WAAAY too big for the room (it's 9000 btu and the room's about 6ft square) but with the application of some extra controls (I work for an HVAC controls company) I managed to keep the runtime reasonable.
You may be able to find smaller units - some people have suggested RV units, that might work better. Just be sure to get "low ambient" options if you live where it gets below 60 degrees outside, and you expect to need it during the winter. Otherwise, you'll be replacing the compressor after the first winter. Basic low ambient items are some heat tape wrapped around the compressor and a pressure switch that cycles the outdoor fan.
If your heat levels aren't too bad you might get away with just a bathroom exhaust vent in the ceiling. I bought a combo light/exhaust fan and replaced the closet's light. Installed a line-voltage thermostat on the wall, and now the exhaust fan comes on if the closet gets too hot. Make sure the closet door has a decent gap at the bottom to allow air in. Unfortunately, my heat load was high enough that the fan pretty much ran all the time...
I must be another "strange creature"! I'm guessing it started for me because the first computer I owned was a TI-99/4A. The keyboard on it was somewhat "squashed". And now I find the keys on a full-size keyboard annoying. I can type on it, but just don't like it.
The keyboard on my laptop is just fine, though. Until recently I didn't like them because of the feel, but the latest couple of laptops I've had at work are wonderful. The people at my office are amazed that I can sit and type on it all day long at full speed. (And the speed I can type amazes them too, for some reason - I only go around 50-60 WPM, not all that fast to me...)
But my _favorite_ keyboard at the moment is the Happy Hacker 2-lite. If I could just mount that to the laptop...!
While that would be the ideal, I usually take the "reinstall" as an opportunity to clear out all the cruft I've accumulated over the months or years. I just back up to the server, maybe make a dupe on a USB HD, then pull data over as I need it. After a while, I burn what's left to CD and delete.
I'm bad at housekeeping, so having an opportunity to sit around and remember just what I did to get everything working last time (for whatever reason, an enjoyable experience to me!;) gives me an excuse to tidy up at the same time.
As for not even trying the upgrade, probably a leftover from my Windows years. Upgrading Windows was always an unmitigated disaster...!
I won't necessarily say I use Slackware because those items don't exist, but I do use it because of frustration with many of those things on other distros.
Preface to say, I have been using Slackware since I first started with Linux, back around 1994 or so, so I've had plenty of time over the years to get used to "bare metal".
However, I have frequently wished I could just "apt-get install whatever" so I've tried various distros over the years. Used Red Hat for quite a while, really enjoyed Mandrake, never could get Debian going for whatever reason, Gentoo is nice but I don't like to wait that long! Every one of them, though, I wound up hitting a bunch of annoying problems, mostly related to package managers. I'd be going along fine until I wanted some one thing that I couldn't find in just the right form as a premade package. After I had installed it manually, things seemed to unravel slowly from that point on. Gentoo surprised me most, everyone extols the beauty of "emerge -u world" (if I'm remembering right) and the one time I had a great system running (with no custom packages by me) I did that and X refused to compile or run after that...
With Slackware, I just compile and install everything as I desire, and have almost never had a problem. Occasionally I have to recompile something to add this or that support that I forgot but still no great shakes. The only time I ever really got frustrated was back when I wanted to upgrade Gnome or something (can't remember exactly, I just remember it was big) and there were so many little things I had to donwload and compile I just decided heck with it. (This was one of the points where I tried a new distro!)
And the newbie-friendly admin tools I've never really trusted (not that I gave them much of a chance). It's old hat for me to edit a text file, even my Windows desktop here at work almost always had a terminal window open, so I'm not concerned there. But the few times I used GUI tools they either saved things in a bizarre format, or they couldn't parse the edits I made, making them useless to me.
I've never cared to follow the pack, and I really dislike a lot of hand-holding ("you-need-this!") so Slack's definitely been the long-term favorite.
I've tried this. Most frustrating 30 miles of biking I ever did!;)
I live all of 5 miles from my office. I'd love to ride my bike (and have, two weeks last year and just finished about 3 weeks last month) but the "last mile" is the problem! It's all residential and pleasant until I get right near my office. I have tried every side route I could think of, and can literally see my office building 1/4 mile away across a field from the nearest side road. But between the tall grass, stickers and railroad right of way (3 1/2 ft high berm!) it's basically unnavigable. Especially on my comfy but pavement-bound recumbent bike.
So I wind up having to go 1 mile down a VERY busy 4-lane divided. 50 MPH, LOTS of businesses for people to turn in and out of, no shoulder just a curb. I've done it, and it doesn't bother me to ride streets like that occasionally, but to do it twice per day every day during rush hour...
Grr... If they'd just put in that short stretch of side road!... (Probably will, too, about the time our lease is up on this building and we move out!)
I haven't had to cancel yet, so don't know that end of it. But I almost never make long distance calls, and I would say VoIP is still quite desirable. Granted, my usage is also out of the norm.
I switched from SBC POTS to Cox Cable's phone system because it was cheaper. Not a whole lot, but a bit. Then I switched to VoIP because it is HALF Cox's price and gives me a ton more features. Being able to check my messages online from anywhere is icing on the cake. I only have Vonage's 500 minute plan, but then if I'm on the phone for 8 1/2 hours in a single month something really strange is happening! If I were to use it that much, the $25 plan is still cheaper than what I was paying Cox for the service provided. Indeed, Cox would have been much higher than what I was paying them if I had added everything available to make it as close as possible to Vonage.
I have recently gotten flyers from both SBC and Cox offering "cheap" service - the last one was $4.95/month. But they are limited time, a year or less, and they STILL charge extra for any line features. They still haven't figured it out...
Having a huge truck or SUV bearing down on you can be somewhat intimidating, but just because they WANT to go faster, and act like they won't stop for your little car, doesn't mean they won't. Maybe I have nerves of steel, or perhaps I'm just numb anymore, but I maintain my speed and people like this simply don't bother me. Yes, I've had some of them get mighty close, but they have all slowed down in the end. Or figured out that there's another lane, if available. Regardless of attitude, most drivers still realize that actually hitting the person in front of them is a pretty stupid idea.
There are a few things I do to better accomodate them, though. First and foremost, if I'm one of the slower drivers on the road I stay to the right. (On a multilane highway, I get in a center lane, but there's still one or more inside lanes available.) If I'm passing someone slower than me, and they are coming up behind me like that, I'll gun it a bit to get past the person I'm passing so they don't have to slow down as much. Things like that.
Most of the time, I stick to the speed limit. I don't like having to be on the lookout for cops and have better things to do with my money. Most of my highway driving is in town near rush hour and the people speeding are just going to have to slam on the brakes in a mile or so anyway, so what's the point? And I've done the math. For nearly all of my driving, the time saved by speeding might save me a minute or two (5 for the longest regular distance) if I can maintain that elevated speed for my entire trip. Woo.
There is one time I purposely sped though. And the time savings was the whole reason. I drove straight through to a relative's house, just shy of 1000 miles. Going an additional 5 MPH shaved 1 hour off the trip time. That was substantial enough to be worth it, and the open highway is almost always empty enough to allow for that. (Of course, most people around me would have said I still wasn't speeding - 5 over seems to be the minimum speed for nearly everyone else!)
Not necessarily. At my office, most people have laptops with wireless cards built in so they can work easily from home or at customer sites. But our corporate policy (until very recently) was NO WLAN in our offices. Even now, it has to be Cisco with LEAP, so they can be sure the network is secure.
They have had a lot of trouble in other cities with people bringing in their Linksys or D-Link home APs and plugging them into the LAN so they can "go wireless". Of course, the network guys back at the home office have no way of verifying that these APs are properly secured (or secured at all), and since the office's "LAN Admin" (if one exists) is seldom competent to do the job (they usually have the accounting controller handle it) they don't have anyone onsite who can reliably check, so the rule was "no wireless".
I'd say it really depends on your network connection. Some of the home connections seem to be getting much better (if only because of liberal use of port-blocking on the part of the provider), while others still appear to be wide open and frequently hit.
Also, corporate LANs can be a problem. At my office, I have given up trying to set up fresh installs on the corporate LAN. What's _supposed_ to happen is I install the image disk provided by corporate, then put it on the LAN. The IT bunch has a script that runs when you login that checks for and applies the required (and approved by them) security patches. (These are older computers, Win2K, being reimaged for new employees or whatever.)
Problem is, for about the past year I have been completely unable to do that. By the time it even starts checking for patches the machine is already infected! (This is a HUGE "flat LAN", nationwide.) So what I do now is install the corp image, then get on a DSL line we have at our office (protected by a Linux firewall, run by me, with very few people even allowed access) and go to Windows Update. This applies a LOT more patches than corporate has "authorized", but so far no problems. And I get done a whole lot faster too.
Funny thing, another person in the office actually called and mentioned this to the IT staff once and they grudgingly admitted that while they can't officially support it, they do the same thing!
Actually, depending on the relative humidity levels, it just may be easier (more efficient) to cool the 130 degree air. Dryer air takes less energy to cool. If the air has already been cooled to 50-60F, and hasn't had any humidity introduced (closed system), it will very frequently have less moisture content than the 110F air you are pulling from somewhere else.
Now, if you put a humidity sensor in the return air (above the racks) as well as the replacement air (outside, whatever) whenever the enthalpy of the replacement air is lower, by all means use it and vent the return. (This is comparative enthalpy - based economizing, for HVAC systems.)
Of course, the humidity sensors and controls will cost more than the plastic sheeting or cardboard...
I haven't tried the MS systems, but on Linux they *can*. It isn't always easy, as you said background processes usually keep my laptop's HDD from ever spinning down.
My server, though, does spin down as I have it fairly stripped down. The (software) RAID array drives can spin down, even if the main OS drive doesn't. Of course once I proved that I could do that and the system wouldn't freak out waiting for the drives to spin back up I started wondering about the relative merits of doing that. Is the wear and tear of running 24/7 worse, or the wear and tear of occasional spin-ups as well as the thermal changes? I seldom use the drives in the array - they are primarily for backups - but in the end I wound up just leaving them running.
At one time I went through some power-saving or laptop Howto that discussed all the things that can be done to minimize HDD access, and actually got the laptop HDD to spin down regularly. But then I installed a different Linux version and never got around to setting all that up again... I never noticed a huge difference in power usage, either. My laptop's a Dell C840, which is pretty beefy (closer to "portable desktop") so perhaps the drive isn't as large a part of the power budget.
I had a very similar experience, and I assure you 1% (1/2 hour per week?!?) is nowhere close. I work for a multinational that is too cheap to put admins in each office. Instead, they have a small crew of very sharp people at headquarters, and someone - in our case the Controller - also gets admin duties. Our Controller left, and everyone decided I would be a great fill-in until they got a new Controller (my boss doesn't actually want me doing it, so it isn't supposed to be permanent). Since I was already busy enough, everyone in the office (around 40 people) was told to call the corporate help desk first. In theory all the IT folks back at the main office would do the bulk of the work and I would just have to handle "real emergencies" or something like that.
Yeah, sure...
The first two weeks I spent half of my week or more on "IT duties". It has tapered off some, but even though they are calling the help desk, and I don't actually have to do a lot of the work myself, I still spend at least 5-6 hours per week. Mostly on the more irritating end user items - "my printer won't work". Plus things that evidently can't be done remotely anyway - "hey, we need you to go in and do this on your server for us".
That's why I made damn sure there was no HOA, and no CCRs, when I bought my house.
My sister's family bought a house in a "historical" neighborhood. They had to ask permission to put a swing set in the back yard for their kids! They were given permission, provided it was hidden by the fence and couldn't be seen from the street...
A friend at work found out the hard way about HOAs. He didn't even think to ask if there was one in the new subdivision he bought into. He was thrilled when the first several-hundred dollar bill showed up. And he was told he couldn't keep his trash cans on the side of the house. And he had to keep the lawn mowed "just right". And...
I'm a ham radio operator, so of course like putting up "big, ugly" (to who? I think they're beautiful!;) antennas.
So the first words I said to the realtor helping me look at houses was "NO HOA!"
Perhaps. The Corps has a "Corps spec" that they adhere to. This is the document that requires all the BS. If I go down to Fort Sill, and do a job locally with the base commander, they don't even require submittals half the time! (Not a recommended practice, in my opinion, but...) However, if they are required to run it through the Corps (more and more common lately) the "Corps spec" is applied, whether they want it or not.
For many years, the spec (at least for my area - HVAC) was extremely antiquated. Technology had raced well ahead of the devices they were requiring. Certainly the bases didn't want the stuff they were specifying, which caused many to work around the Corps and do the building themselves.
Now, the Corps may have written that spec at the request or even direction of some higher-ups in the military, but the fact remains that we NEVER have such rigorous (and expensive) specs and requirements for military work as we do when working with the Corps.
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Have any good suggestions on NFS tuning docs?!?
I'd sure like to know how to make NFS faster. Right now, on my server, it SUCKS! Read speeds are good (though not great), but it can't write for crap. I can transfer files to/from the exact same directories using scp, and even with the encryption/decryption overhead I get right up to max LAN speed (Gbit network). But the NFS writes will crawl along at 1-2Mbps (yes, bit!) and often stall.
I've tried to find NFS tuning info, but most of the docs I've found mention the same few options that don't seem to be affecting anything. (Primarily wsize/rsize and jumbo frames.) I'm resigning myself to the potential need to start doing the extremely time-consuming tuning procedures I've found, but if anyone knows of something else to check I'd love to hear it! I've also thought about trying out SMB of all things...!
I have used NFS for a long time, and never noticed this behavior before. The only two things that changed recently is going from 100Mbps to 1Gbps (quite a while ago) and using Ubuntu on the desktop (pretty recently, used to use Slackware). I seldom wrote to the NFS drives, so I'm hard pressed to know just when the slowdown happened. The server is and always has been Slackware.
My grandmother died last month, and while I was staying with my aunt we went through boxes of old photos. Many of them people had long forgotten about, and quite a few - from around 1950 on back - were very difficult to even make things out, as they had slowly faded away. Not to mention the question of who gets which photo afterward.
With digital photos, I may have to more frequently keep up with them than regular printed photos, but both take maintenance to really last. I've asked my aunt to send me many of the photos so I can scan them in and distribute them to all the relatives. Even if one loses something, others will have it.
I *wish* my 17" and 19" LCD panels did 1600x1200! I love having the small fonts. My Dell laptops (C840s) have 1600x1200 native resolution on a roughly 15" FP. I can still read things just fine on them and love having that much info on the screen at once. I *hate* having to stack windows!
;). A 19" in the center, and a 17" to either side. Using the desktop metaphor, I compare this to the difference between the crappy desks in the older buildings in college, where you could hardly balance your notebook let alone a textbook on the small fold-out platform, and having a whole table to spread things out on. The high res on the laptop lets me do that even with just a single display.
Unfortunately, it appears for an external FP you have to get up to 21" before you get 1600x1200, so my desktop system has three FPs on it (just because I could!
Granted, my eyes appear to be better than many, even though I do wear glasses (astigmatism). My coworkers often comment that they can't see a darn thing on my laptop!
As others have mentioned, the CPU is definitely unimportant. I bought a Dell Poweredge server a few years back with a 2GHz P4. I set up p4-clockmod, and the thing has never come off the 300MHz minimum speed during normal operation.
The most trouble I've had is keeping it all cool. Between the P4 and all the drives, a fair bit of heat is generated. Stopping the drives when not in use would help there, but then I've always been concerned that the extra starts would increase the failure rate. The way I figure, if they are left running everything stablizes and should live longer than repeated powering on of the motor and the heating/cooling of the drive. So I've never tried setting up power-down. Perhaps that's an inaccurate assumption on my part.
When I lived in an apartment, I put the server in a closet that had the sliding doors. Set it sideways, then left the doors open about 3-4" on both ends. The fans caused enough of a draft to pull cool air in one door and exhaust it out the other. Here in my house I have everything set up in a walk-in closet and things stay cool enough just by leaving the door open most of the time. During the summer, I do have a mini A/C unit in there so I don't have to cool the whole house.
I have been using NFS for a long time, and on the 100Mbps network I never really noticed any problems, although it was slower than other transfer methods. But now that I have 1Gbps to my desktop, it's really lousy. I've tried some tuning tricks, but so far no luck. Especially when writing to the server, NFS is abysmally slow compared to anything else, such as scp. I've considered trying some other filesystems, but haven't gotten around to it yet.
Do you *really* think all the crap going on in airports is doing any good?!
Little if any of it is really making a plane flight any safer than it was before. There are still people getting on planes with things they aren't supposed to. And so what if someone gets on with a box cutter? Now that the pilots are required to stay locked in the cockpit, all that person could do is injure/kill some passengers. And I doubt he'd get far at that, once other passengers figured out what was up.
And then we have some really bullshit rules. Grandma can't take her knitting needles along, but I can carry all the pens and pencils I want. Yeah, this really makes sense...
I wouldn't complain if I was just "inconvenienced". But when I have to show up HOURS ahead of my scheduled flight just to get to the terminal, when - after I've made it to the terminal early to insure an early seat selection (yeah, I usually fly Southwest) - I stand a chance of being dragged out of line for some TSA goon to paw through my carryons, when it's actually just about as fast for me to drive 500 miles as it is to fly to the same destination?!?
That is FAR from "inconvenienced". I don't know how you manage to get through in only 10-15 minutes more. I've never had that sort of experience.
I'm tired of the way we - the citizens and paying customers - are both treated as helpless waifs that can't fend for ourselves and simultaneously presumed guilty of some heinous act. That's why last summer when I headed off to visit relatives halfway across the country and on into Canada I drove the whole way. I didn't have to speak to a single "person of authority" the whole way, except for 30 seconds at the border crossing. (Not to mention, I would have paid MORE - about double! - for the priviledge of being abused by the TSA goons!)
At first it seemed this was the case to me as well, but I have found that many (all?) of the items in "multiverse" - including Mplayer, dvd libraries, etc - don't show up in the basic/default package installer. If I search there, either nothing appears or it shows up grayed out. If I switch to the "advanced" mode and search, everything shows up (with multiple versions even) and I can get it all installed. The only thing not available in the repository was libdvdcss (think that's the name) due to legal issues but libdvdread spit out some instructions when I ran mplayer on how to install that with a supplied shell script.
I was quite pleased - I have a 1GHz desktop leftover from work that I installed 5.10 on, and once I found the above got Mplayer working easily. In far less time (not to mention frustration) than I've ever spent before I was watching and ripping DVDs. Very nice. This machine is now probably destined to replace my "TV computer" out in the living room.
I haven't used it enough yet to comment on anything else, it seemed quite speedy enough to me considering the computer. I'm just about willing to install it on the laptop - that'll be the real test for me.
If only that were the case. Don't underestimate the ability of "the masses" to be uninformed!
I was reading stories from various sources on the riots in France with great interest. The story was seemingly being covered everywhere. But nearly two weeks after they had started, I was still finding people in my office who hadn't heard a single word about them.
Of course, these same people can quote every lame sports statistic in the known universe, so they have to be watching the news at some point. They just don't even hear the bits that don't "affect" them!
So all Sony needs is to hope that the bulk of their customers have TVs that never leave ESPN or HBO. And lately that doesn't seem to be much of a stretch!
Just putting a radiator outside won't work when it's hot outside, unless you get evaporation working for you. There are two ways that can be done - either flow your cooling water over a cooling tower (which means you'll then have to add measures to keep the cooling water clean, and trash-free, as well as replacing the water that evaporates) or add a spray pump to spray water on the outside of your sealed radiator.
:) (It better be a SMALL compressor...!)
Either way, the cooling fan will then cause evaporation to occur, which will lower the temperature of the cooling water. Unless it's extremely humid, you'll be able to get below outside air temp. But you will never get a whole lot below, so don't plan on running a 60 degree F cooling loop when it's 95F outside!
You would have much better success (although the initial cost is pretty stout) setting up a ground-source loop. Drill a well down, run a loop of PVC piping down the well, and flow your coolant through there. Provided you drill enough wells (I don't know the typical capacity per well right off) you'll be able to keep your coolant supply in the 60F - 70F range without too much trouble. This is what we (at work, I do HVAC control systems) have been putting in for quite a few schools lately. But it can take a LOT of wells, and at least in my area each well of roughly 20-30 ft deep will run you around $2,000.
AC units create temperature gradient thanks to the properties of refrigerant, specifically the fact that they change temperature drastically when compressed or expanded. That we use electric compressors in most units is only a convenience, they could be gas-driven (such as in a vehicle) or if you really want a workout, hook one up to a stationary bicycle!
We use the same RSA/Cisco setup where I work. And no, you don't have to enter any other numbers. A few people still have the hard tokens, or key fobs, and they do have to enter the number plus pin. With the soft token, you can open it up in one window and see the same sort of numbers, but they are evidently fed into the VPN client automatically. All I enter is a 4-digit numeric PIN!
I haven't seen that particular style, but it most likely works like a window unit, except the hot air that would normally go outside is being dumped in the area above the drop ceiling.
Most buildings now use "plenum return" air, meaning there aren't return ducts to the main A/C units, they just suck air from above the ceiling. Each room has a grille in the ceiling that lets air from the room get back above the ceiling. This means the little A/C unit is effectively just dumping its heat into the air going back to the main A/C unit, in the same manner as your refrigerator at home.
If the main A/C is off (at night, on weekends, etc) then the Liebert just proceeds to heat the air above the ceiling. Unless the building is really small, or the room is surrounded by firewalls, it would take a long time to overheat, by which time the main A/C should be running again anyway.
This sort of thing might work in the ceiling at home, except that most attics get extremely hot during the summer, possibly exceeding the unit's operating temperature range.
My results have been so-so.
First I tried one of the portable units. Two caveats with them:
1. Get one that has TWO ducts, these suck in air through one to cool the condenser ("outside") coil, then blow the hot air out the other. I got one that had just one, which means it uses some of the room air to cool the condenser. Problem is, in my closet, that meant enough air was being sucked into the closet from the rest of the house that the unit effectively never shut off. Not desirable.
2. Be careful where you vent the exhaust. Many models now have a pump that dumps the condensate over the condenser coil to help increase the cooling. This means the exhaust air can be VERY humid, and you probably don't want to just dump that into your attic. (Oops... I did that...) Especially if it's cool outside (thus the attic is cool) you may wind up with a lot of water collecting in the insulation. So vent it outside!
I decided I wasn't happy with the way the portable worked, so I actually installed a mini-split. WAAAY too big for the room (it's 9000 btu and the room's about 6ft square) but with the application of some extra controls (I work for an HVAC controls company) I managed to keep the runtime reasonable.
You may be able to find smaller units - some people have suggested RV units, that might work better. Just be sure to get "low ambient" options if you live where it gets below 60 degrees outside, and you expect to need it during the winter. Otherwise, you'll be replacing the compressor after the first winter. Basic low ambient items are some heat tape wrapped around the compressor and a pressure switch that cycles the outdoor fan.
If your heat levels aren't too bad you might get away with just a bathroom exhaust vent in the ceiling. I bought a combo light/exhaust fan and replaced the closet's light. Installed a line-voltage thermostat on the wall, and now the exhaust fan comes on if the closet gets too hot. Make sure the closet door has a decent gap at the bottom to allow air in. Unfortunately, my heat load was high enough that the fan pretty much ran all the time...
I must be another "strange creature"! I'm guessing it started for me because the first computer I owned was a TI-99/4A. The keyboard on it was somewhat "squashed". And now I find the keys on a full-size keyboard annoying. I can type on it, but just don't like it.
The keyboard on my laptop is just fine, though. Until recently I didn't like them because of the feel, but the latest couple of laptops I've had at work are wonderful. The people at my office are amazed that I can sit and type on it all day long at full speed. (And the speed I can type amazes them too, for some reason - I only go around 50-60 WPM, not all that fast to me...)
But my _favorite_ keyboard at the moment is the Happy Hacker 2-lite. If I could just mount that to the laptop...!
While that would be the ideal, I usually take the "reinstall" as an opportunity to clear out all the cruft I've accumulated over the months or years. I just back up to the server, maybe make a dupe on a USB HD, then pull data over as I need it. After a while, I burn what's left to CD and delete.
;) gives me an excuse to tidy up at the same time.
I'm bad at housekeeping, so having an opportunity to sit around and remember just what I did to get everything working last time (for whatever reason, an enjoyable experience to me!
As for not even trying the upgrade, probably a leftover from my Windows years. Upgrading Windows was always an unmitigated disaster...!
I won't necessarily say I use Slackware because those items don't exist, but I do use it because of frustration with many of those things on other distros.
Preface to say, I have been using Slackware since I first started with Linux, back around 1994 or so, so I've had plenty of time over the years to get used to "bare metal".
However, I have frequently wished I could just "apt-get install whatever" so I've tried various distros over the years. Used Red Hat for quite a while, really enjoyed Mandrake, never could get Debian going for whatever reason, Gentoo is nice but I don't like to wait that long! Every one of them, though, I wound up hitting a bunch of annoying problems, mostly related to package managers. I'd be going along fine until I wanted some one thing that I couldn't find in just the right form as a premade package. After I had installed it manually, things seemed to unravel slowly from that point on. Gentoo surprised me most, everyone extols the beauty of "emerge -u world" (if I'm remembering right) and the one time I had a great system running (with no custom packages by me) I did that and X refused to compile or run after that...
With Slackware, I just compile and install everything as I desire, and have almost never had a problem. Occasionally I have to recompile something to add this or that support that I forgot but still no great shakes. The only time I ever really got frustrated was back when I wanted to upgrade Gnome or something (can't remember exactly, I just remember it was big) and there were so many little things I had to donwload and compile I just decided heck with it. (This was one of the points where I tried a new distro!)
And the newbie-friendly admin tools I've never really trusted (not that I gave them much of a chance). It's old hat for me to edit a text file, even my Windows desktop here at work almost always had a terminal window open, so I'm not concerned there. But the few times I used GUI tools they either saved things in a bizarre format, or they couldn't parse the edits I made, making them useless to me.
I've never cared to follow the pack, and I really dislike a lot of hand-holding ("you-need-this!") so Slack's definitely been the long-term favorite.
I've tried this. Most frustrating 30 miles of biking I ever did! ;)
I live all of 5 miles from my office. I'd love to ride my bike (and have, two weeks last year and just finished about 3 weeks last month) but the "last mile" is the problem! It's all residential and pleasant until I get right near my office. I have tried every side route I could think of, and can literally see my office building 1/4 mile away across a field from the nearest side road. But between the tall grass, stickers and railroad right of way (3 1/2 ft high berm!) it's basically unnavigable. Especially on my comfy but pavement-bound recumbent bike.
So I wind up having to go 1 mile down a VERY busy 4-lane divided. 50 MPH, LOTS of businesses for people to turn in and out of, no shoulder just a curb. I've done it, and it doesn't bother me to ride streets like that occasionally, but to do it twice per day every day during rush hour...
Grr... If they'd just put in that short stretch of side road!... (Probably will, too, about the time our lease is up on this building and we move out!)
I haven't had to cancel yet, so don't know that end of it. But I almost never make long distance calls, and I would say VoIP is still quite desirable. Granted, my usage is also out of the norm.
I switched from SBC POTS to Cox Cable's phone system because it was cheaper. Not a whole lot, but a bit. Then I switched to VoIP because it is HALF Cox's price and gives me a ton more features. Being able to check my messages online from anywhere is icing on the cake. I only have Vonage's 500 minute plan, but then if I'm on the phone for 8 1/2 hours in a single month something really strange is happening! If I were to use it that much, the $25 plan is still cheaper than what I was paying Cox for the service provided. Indeed, Cox would have been much higher than what I was paying them if I had added everything available to make it as close as possible to Vonage.
I have recently gotten flyers from both SBC and Cox offering "cheap" service - the last one was $4.95/month. But they are limited time, a year or less, and they STILL charge extra for any line features. They still haven't figured it out...
Having a huge truck or SUV bearing down on you can be somewhat intimidating, but just because they WANT to go faster, and act like they won't stop for your little car, doesn't mean they won't. Maybe I have nerves of steel, or perhaps I'm just numb anymore, but I maintain my speed and people like this simply don't bother me. Yes, I've had some of them get mighty close, but they have all slowed down in the end. Or figured out that there's another lane, if available. Regardless of attitude, most drivers still realize that actually hitting the person in front of them is a pretty stupid idea.
There are a few things I do to better accomodate them, though. First and foremost, if I'm one of the slower drivers on the road I stay to the right. (On a multilane highway, I get in a center lane, but there's still one or more inside lanes available.) If I'm passing someone slower than me, and they are coming up behind me like that, I'll gun it a bit to get past the person I'm passing so they don't have to slow down as much. Things like that.
Most of the time, I stick to the speed limit. I don't like having to be on the lookout for cops and have better things to do with my money. Most of my highway driving is in town near rush hour and the people speeding are just going to have to slam on the brakes in a mile or so anyway, so what's the point? And I've done the math. For nearly all of my driving, the time saved by speeding might save me a minute or two (5 for the longest regular distance) if I can maintain that elevated speed for my entire trip. Woo.
There is one time I purposely sped though. And the time savings was the whole reason. I drove straight through to a relative's house, just shy of 1000 miles. Going an additional 5 MPH shaved 1 hour off the trip time. That was substantial enough to be worth it, and the open highway is almost always empty enough to allow for that. (Of course, most people around me would have said I still wasn't speeding - 5 over seems to be the minimum speed for nearly everyone else!)
Or, secondarily, some state legislator got nailed by one and decided they had to go!
Not necessarily. At my office, most people have laptops with wireless cards built in so they can work easily from home or at customer sites. But our corporate policy (until very recently) was NO WLAN in our offices. Even now, it has to be Cisco with LEAP, so they can be sure the network is secure.
They have had a lot of trouble in other cities with people bringing in their Linksys or D-Link home APs and plugging them into the LAN so they can "go wireless". Of course, the network guys back at the home office have no way of verifying that these APs are properly secured (or secured at all), and since the office's "LAN Admin" (if one exists) is seldom competent to do the job (they usually have the accounting controller handle it) they don't have anyone onsite who can reliably check, so the rule was "no wireless".
I'd say it really depends on your network connection. Some of the home connections seem to be getting much better (if only because of liberal use of port-blocking on the part of the provider), while others still appear to be wide open and frequently hit.
Also, corporate LANs can be a problem. At my office, I have given up trying to set up fresh installs on the corporate LAN. What's _supposed_ to happen is I install the image disk provided by corporate, then put it on the LAN. The IT bunch has a script that runs when you login that checks for and applies the required (and approved by them) security patches. (These are older computers, Win2K, being reimaged for new employees or whatever.)
Problem is, for about the past year I have been completely unable to do that. By the time it even starts checking for patches the machine is already infected! (This is a HUGE "flat LAN", nationwide.) So what I do now is install the corp image, then get on a DSL line we have at our office (protected by a Linux firewall, run by me, with very few people even allowed access) and go to Windows Update. This applies a LOT more patches than corporate has "authorized", but so far no problems. And I get done a whole lot faster too.
Funny thing, another person in the office actually called and mentioned this to the IT staff once and they grudgingly admitted that while they can't officially support it, they do the same thing!
Actually, depending on the relative humidity levels, it just may be easier (more efficient) to cool the 130 degree air. Dryer air takes less energy to cool. If the air has already been cooled to 50-60F, and hasn't had any humidity introduced (closed system), it will very frequently have less moisture content than the 110F air you are pulling from somewhere else.
Now, if you put a humidity sensor in the return air (above the racks) as well as the replacement air (outside, whatever) whenever the enthalpy of the replacement air is lower, by all means use it and vent the return. (This is comparative enthalpy - based economizing, for HVAC systems.)
Of course, the humidity sensors and controls will cost more than the plastic sheeting or cardboard...
I haven't tried the MS systems, but on Linux they *can*. It isn't always easy, as you said background processes usually keep my laptop's HDD from ever spinning down.
My server, though, does spin down as I have it fairly stripped down. The (software) RAID array drives can spin down, even if the main OS drive doesn't. Of course once I proved that I could do that and the system wouldn't freak out waiting for the drives to spin back up I started wondering about the relative merits of doing that. Is the wear and tear of running 24/7 worse, or the wear and tear of occasional spin-ups as well as the thermal changes? I seldom use the drives in the array - they are primarily for backups - but in the end I wound up just leaving them running.
At one time I went through some power-saving or laptop Howto that discussed all the things that can be done to minimize HDD access, and actually got the laptop HDD to spin down regularly. But then I installed a different Linux version and never got around to setting all that up again... I never noticed a huge difference in power usage, either. My laptop's a Dell C840, which is pretty beefy (closer to "portable desktop") so perhaps the drive isn't as large a part of the power budget.
I had a very similar experience, and I assure you 1% (1/2 hour per week?!?) is nowhere close. I work for a multinational that is too cheap to put admins in each office. Instead, they have a small crew of very sharp people at headquarters, and someone - in our case the Controller - also gets admin duties. Our Controller left, and everyone decided I would be a great fill-in until they got a new Controller (my boss doesn't actually want me doing it, so it isn't supposed to be permanent). Since I was already busy enough, everyone in the office (around 40 people) was told to call the corporate help desk first. In theory all the IT folks back at the main office would do the bulk of the work and I would just have to handle "real emergencies" or something like that.
Yeah, sure...
The first two weeks I spent half of my week or more on "IT duties". It has tapered off some, but even though they are calling the help desk, and I don't actually have to do a lot of the work myself, I still spend at least 5-6 hours per week. Mostly on the more irritating end user items - "my printer won't work". Plus things that evidently can't be done remotely anyway - "hey, we need you to go in and do this on your server for us".
That's why I made damn sure there was no HOA, and no CCRs, when I bought my house.
;) antennas.
My sister's family bought a house in a "historical" neighborhood. They had to ask permission to put a swing set in the back yard for their kids! They were given permission, provided it was hidden by the fence and couldn't be seen from the street...
A friend at work found out the hard way about HOAs. He didn't even think to ask if there was one in the new subdivision he bought into. He was thrilled when the first several-hundred dollar bill showed up. And he was told he couldn't keep his trash cans on the side of the house. And he had to keep the lawn mowed "just right". And...
I'm a ham radio operator, so of course like putting up "big, ugly" (to who? I think they're beautiful!
So the first words I said to the realtor helping me look at houses was "NO HOA!"
Perhaps. The Corps has a "Corps spec" that they adhere to. This is the document that requires all the BS. If I go down to Fort Sill, and do a job locally with the base commander, they don't even require submittals half the time! (Not a recommended practice, in my opinion, but...) However, if they are required to run it through the Corps (more and more common lately) the "Corps spec" is applied, whether they want it or not.
For many years, the spec (at least for my area - HVAC) was extremely antiquated. Technology had raced well ahead of the devices they were requiring. Certainly the bases didn't want the stuff they were specifying, which caused many to work around the Corps and do the building themselves.
Now, the Corps may have written that spec at the request or even direction of some higher-ups in the military, but the fact remains that we NEVER have such rigorous (and expensive) specs and requirements for military work as we do when working with the Corps.