And when you run out, I'll be next to you scalping pitchforks and torches at twice what you were selling them for;)
Just a thought, do you have bulk purchase rates?
Failing that, I'm falling back to popcorn and lawn chairs.
Your problem is probably the Raptors; I'm running two Raptor 150s in RAID 0 and it took a bit of work to get them to be well behaved. I did see a kernel panic on SUSE-10.2, IIRC, but 11 worked. Right now I'm running them under Fedora-8, and had them work under Fedora-9.
To be fair, my Windows box wouldn't even recognize them... if you check forums, you'll find that the Raptors have issues across every OS and hardware combination. Some combinations work, others fail right out of the gate. Sometimes you get lucky and all you need is a BIOS flash.
Try Slackware, I've yet to see a box that can't run Slack. I have had AHCI issues with the NForce4 chipset, though and I had to hang around kernel 2.6.21.5 (only because fixing it meaning breaking iSCSI in the kernel - which was a deal breaker for my NAS box). Use the 2.6 huge kernel on install, it's got the kitchen sink and a bag of chips.
Then make sure to get your drivers right from NVidia (BTW, isn't the 9800GT one of the 'plagued' NVidia cards? I'd keep that thing cool if I were you) and you should be set. Head over to kernel.org and compile a bleeding edge kernel for your mobo, too. If you really like gnome, you'll be wanting to look in to dropline or freerock, as Slackware only ships with KDE, flux, xfce.
12.0 is very stable, 11.0 is generally good, and 10.2 is like a rock. If nothing else works, 10.2 with generic kernel modules will run on anything.
Where should we send funds for assisting Ray? I'm sure he won't be able to work as much until this thing is settled. He's had our backs for a looong time, we should do what we can to help him out. Furthermore, I don't like people bullying my friends.
Anyone care to throw in a few bucks? I'm in for $20.
IIRC, this is how the Office Depot tech. recycling thing works. They crush the stuff with large "wheels" with metal "teeth" and then shake and sift out the gold plated stuff (probably heat it to get the gold by itself), glass, PCB, etc. I have no idea how I know this, but I'm fairly sure I read it in their pamphlet (I got a tech-recycling thing going on at work... a day where everyone brings in their old electronics - it's more economical to buy their big box than their small one... I took the pamphlet to work to show my boss, as we've had hard drives that need to be destroyed for some time now) or just made it up in my mind after reading their pamphlet. I'm sure its on their website if anyone needs the karma and could hunt down the link.
With a turbo button and a left shift key, I can clean boot to DOS 6.0 so I can run Doom (after a few lowmem and xmms tweaks) at full speed!
Right. Like I'm the only one who used AOL floppy disks loaded with memory hacks to get Doom running. You all know you did the same thing when you were a kid and sneaker-netted Doom.
I looked at OL about three years ago (when they had just released their Eclipse IDE plugin), and it always struck me as a really cool language with the ability to do so many things, but without a following whatsoever. The website was somewhat incomplete and everything looked like it was a work in progress by a single guy or something. What's the deal with it? Is it gaining ground, is it keeping up with AJAXy stuff? The only reason I strayed away from it was that I got this feeling it would be gone without a trace in a few years. At about the same time that you started to use OL, I chose not to and decided to gain better mastery of the languages I use; are you happy that you decided to use it? Should I go back and give it a second look?
The actual servers in the racks are the LEAST valuable part of a good data center. They're also the highest depreciating.
No doubt, you can pick up used Sun equipment CHEAP. For instance, I love to window shop AnySystem, one of their current "Ugly Duckling Special" (scratched boxes, missing face plates, etc.) had a list price of $21,000 - you can get it now for $1200 (yeah - a 6GB RAM, 6 CPU SPARC box for a grand). You can get this stuff second-hand for 5% of what they cost less than a decade ago. With the storage rigs, the drives cost more than the rackmount/backplane. Unfortunately, drives don't usually live long enough to make it to the second hand market, and you don't want the ones that do.
Same boat here. Started on Slack, use RHEL at work, and Mac/FreeBSD/Slackware proper and BlueWhite64 (unofficial 64 bit Slackware port)/Fedora at home. But I have absolutely no problem running any distro (or Solaris) once I find out if its got sysV or BSD inits.
And then you get the great Eliminator; X11 gets broken and all you've got is an SSH prompt to work from. This is where the men are separated from the boys.
[...]
First hatched in 1996, the Hometown Utilicom network in Kutztown was designed as a âoetalkingâ electric system, where if a transformer malfunctioned, itâ(TM)d communicate with the main system and be easy to trace, said Frank Caruso, Kutztownâ(TM)s director of information technology.
But now, the system services more than 1,000 households with Internet and cable, Caruso said. He said the system covers the entire 1.5 square miles of the municipality and there are about 2,200 electric meters in the area, so Hometown Utilicom serves 49 percent of the people in Kutztown.
Caruso said the boroughâ(TM)s total investment in the project has been about $8 million since its inception, and the services are available to everyone within the borough, though some people elect to stay with the original service provider.
The money invested in the project didnâ(TM)t come from a tax hike either. It came from a taxable bond that allows private companies to purchase and use the fiber lines and transfers from the boroughâ(TM)s Electric Service Fund. This debt could be repaid if the Kutztownâ(TM)s town council decided to do so, Caruso said.
Caruso said the FTTH system doesnâ(TM)t just help the customers using it. He said once the system went online, the competitionâ(TM)s cable TV prices split in half. People out of the service area pay about $53 for cable, but residents who have the choice of Hometown Utilicom or Service Electric Cable TV and Communications pay $25 for cable. [...]
The article also doesn't mention that Kutztown has deployed wifi around the town.
No. Perfectly reasonable; as programmers we can attest to the fact that everything always goes wrong. Haven't you ever heard the definition of programmer? Programmer: The kind of person that looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.
I always assume that my code is the only working non-OS process and everything it has to interface has crashed and burnt without having the common decency to inform anyone or even try to restart, the log drive is full and my every memory allocation fails. Then again, I make none of these assumptions when I'm doing 'doze programming;). Probably because every *nix programmer writes paranoid code as I do. I've (*sigh* I can't believe I'm about to admit this) fatfingered an effective 'rm -rf/.' with a shell command on a production box. Before and the windows clients connected went down harder and faster than the Linux box that was limping along screaming "'Tis but a flesh wound!" Had to put the thing down like Old Yeller and ddrescue through the night.
The other thing I can't stand, personally, is when someone comes over to speak with you and you hold a finger up, as if to say "just one minute" (you've been on a code section for 45 minutes and you know you're juggling eggs to the max of your ability); three lines of code should finish up and you can let it all expire and get swapped out. Loudly they blurt out "Hey, have you seen my coffee mug? I can't find it."
Poof. You watch every variable and interaction disintegrate from your minds eye as you, still holding up a finger to signal that you're busy, stammer, "...mug?... Have I... seen your... coffee mug. No, I don't even know what it looks like." With that you spend the next 15 minutes trying to figure out how everything was working together coming down to the function return.
If you have the time, build it yourself. Getting something that 'just works' is fine and all, but you get a generic computer that is LCD (even when it comes to semi-professional workstations).
Invest the time and a little extra cash to custom tailor a workstation to your needs and you'll have a machine that is faster, more upgradable, and more reliable than the generic alternative. Just having a quality motherboard is 80% of the fight. Avoid products with cheap capacitors and gimmick technologies, you'll thank yourself later.
How is your performance with ext3 on top of LVM? LVM is great in theory, but in practice, I've always found it 'feels' slow (I haven't tested the theory, but it seems well enough pronounced that I feel comfortable going with my intuition). I thought that it was just because the volumes were spread all over (increased seek time), but it seems slow even for short stroked volumes on top of RAID. I've tried everything - aligning my strides to the RAID array, different sized chunks, and every time the result is that LVM just feels clunky when compared to a file system running on top of bare metal. Have you experienced this at all?
Slashdot Mirror
And when you run out, I'll be next to you scalping pitchforks and torches at twice what you were selling them for ;)
Just a thought, do you have bulk purchase rates?
Failing that, I'm falling back to popcorn and lawn chairs.
The cheapies use Realtek chips, too.
Your problem is probably the Raptors; I'm running two Raptor 150s in RAID 0 and it took a bit of work to get them to be well behaved. I did see a kernel panic on SUSE-10.2, IIRC, but 11 worked. Right now I'm running them under Fedora-8, and had them work under Fedora-9.
To be fair, my Windows box wouldn't even recognize them... if you check forums, you'll find that the Raptors have issues across every OS and hardware combination. Some combinations work, others fail right out of the gate. Sometimes you get lucky and all you need is a BIOS flash.
Try Slackware, I've yet to see a box that can't run Slack. I have had AHCI issues with the NForce4 chipset, though and I had to hang around kernel 2.6.21.5 (only because fixing it meaning breaking iSCSI in the kernel - which was a deal breaker for my NAS box). Use the 2.6 huge kernel on install, it's got the kitchen sink and a bag of chips.
Then make sure to get your drivers right from NVidia (BTW, isn't the 9800GT one of the 'plagued' NVidia cards? I'd keep that thing cool if I were you) and you should be set. Head over to kernel.org and compile a bleeding edge kernel for your mobo, too. If you really like gnome, you'll be wanting to look in to dropline or freerock, as Slackware only ships with KDE, flux, xfce.
12.0 is very stable, 11.0 is generally good, and 10.2 is like a rock. If nothing else works, 10.2 with generic kernel modules will run on anything.
Anyone care to throw in a few bucks? I'm in for $20.
Well, there's up, down, top, bottom, charm, and strange.
Glad to be of assistance. No need to thank me.
For those who don't get it:Quark
IIRC, this is how the Office Depot tech. recycling thing works. They crush the stuff with large "wheels" with metal "teeth" and then shake and sift out the gold plated stuff (probably heat it to get the gold by itself), glass, PCB, etc. I have no idea how I know this, but I'm fairly sure I read it in their pamphlet (I got a tech-recycling thing going on at work... a day where everyone brings in their old electronics - it's more economical to buy their big box than their small one... I took the pamphlet to work to show my boss, as we've had hard drives that need to be destroyed for some time now) or just made it up in my mind after reading their pamphlet. I'm sure its on their website if anyone needs the karma and could hunt down the link.
With a turbo button and a left shift key, I can clean boot to DOS 6.0 so I can run Doom (after a few lowmem and xmms tweaks) at full speed!
Right. Like I'm the only one who used AOL floppy disks loaded with memory hacks to get Doom running. You all know you did the same thing when you were a kid and sneaker-netted Doom.
Where are they located?
you can email me @ scottSLACKWARE.lovenberg@gmail.com (minus the distro in caps)
I looked at OL about three years ago (when they had just released their Eclipse IDE plugin), and it always struck me as a really cool language with the ability to do so many things, but without a following whatsoever. The website was somewhat incomplete and everything looked like it was a work in progress by a single guy or something. What's the deal with it? Is it gaining ground, is it keeping up with AJAXy stuff? The only reason I strayed away from it was that I got this feeling it would be gone without a trace in a few years.
At about the same time that you started to use OL, I chose not to and decided to gain better mastery of the languages I use; are you happy that you decided to use it? Should I go back and give it a second look?
The actual servers in the racks are the LEAST valuable part of a good data center. They're also the highest depreciating.
No doubt, you can pick up used Sun equipment CHEAP. For instance, I love to window shop AnySystem, one of their current "Ugly Duckling Special" (scratched boxes, missing face plates, etc.) had a list price of $21,000 - you can get it now for $1200 (yeah - a 6GB RAM, 6 CPU SPARC box for a grand). You can get this stuff second-hand for 5% of what they cost less than a decade ago. With the storage rigs, the drives cost more than the rackmount/backplane. Unfortunately, drives don't usually live long enough to make it to the second hand market, and you don't want the ones that do.
Hey, hey, hey! Leave Ubuntu out of this.
Think 'MP3' encoding...
Same boat here. Started on Slack, use RHEL at work, and Mac/FreeBSD/Slackware proper and BlueWhite64 (unofficial 64 bit Slackware port)/Fedora at home. But I have absolutely no problem running any distro (or Solaris) once I find out if its got sysV or BSD inits.
And then you get the great Eliminator; X11 gets broken and all you've got is an SSH prompt to work from. This is where the men are separated from the boys.
Except it uses BSD style init instead of sysV.
[...]
First hatched in 1996, the Hometown Utilicom network in Kutztown was designed as a âoetalkingâ electric system, where if a transformer malfunctioned, itâ(TM)d communicate with the main system and be easy to trace, said Frank Caruso, Kutztownâ(TM)s director of information technology.
But now, the system services more than 1,000 households with Internet and cable, Caruso said. He said the system covers the entire 1.5 square miles of the municipality and there are about 2,200 electric meters in the area, so Hometown Utilicom serves 49 percent of the people in Kutztown.
Caruso said the boroughâ(TM)s total investment in the project has been about $8 million since its inception, and the services are available to everyone within the borough, though some people elect to stay with the original service provider.
The money invested in the project didnâ(TM)t come from a tax hike either. It came from a taxable bond that allows private companies to purchase and use the fiber lines and transfers from the boroughâ(TM)s Electric Service Fund. This debt could be repaid if the Kutztownâ(TM)s town council decided to do so, Caruso said.
Caruso said the FTTH system doesnâ(TM)t just help the customers using it. He said once the system went online, the competitionâ(TM)s cable TV prices split in half. People out of the service area pay about $53 for cable, but residents who have the choice of Hometown Utilicom or Service Electric Cable TV and Communications pay $25 for cable.
[...]
The article also doesn't mention that Kutztown has deployed wifi around the town.
No. Perfectly reasonable; as programmers we can attest to the fact that everything always goes wrong. Haven't you ever heard the definition of programmer?
;). Probably because every *nix programmer writes paranoid code as I do. I've (*sigh* I can't believe I'm about to admit this) fatfingered an effective 'rm -rf /.' with a shell command on a production box. Before and the windows clients connected went down harder and faster than the Linux box that was limping along screaming "'Tis but a flesh wound!" Had to put the thing down like Old Yeller and ddrescue through the night.
Programmer: The kind of person that looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.
I always assume that my code is the only working non-OS process and everything it has to interface has crashed and burnt without having the common decency to inform anyone or even try to restart, the log drive is full and my every memory allocation fails. Then again, I make none of these assumptions when I'm doing 'doze programming
The other thing I can't stand, personally, is when someone comes over to speak with you and you hold a finger up, as if to say "just one minute" (you've been on a code section for 45 minutes and you know you're juggling eggs to the max of your ability); three lines of code should finish up and you can let it all expire and get swapped out. Loudly they blurt out "Hey, have you seen my coffee mug? I can't find it."
Poof. You watch every variable and interaction disintegrate from your minds eye as you, still holding up a finger to signal that you're busy, stammer, "...mug?... Have I... seen your... coffee mug. No, I don't even know what it looks like." With that you spend the next 15 minutes trying to figure out how everything was working together coming down to the function return.
The borough of Kutztown, PA :)
No, seriously, a town in the middle of Amish country strung with fiber.
[...]But I have absolutely no credentials and nothing to back this up with.[...]
Good.
That puts you on equal footing with the rest of the world, whether we'd like to believe it or not.
Meh.
Why not?
A good guy, no doubt. However, I'm not so keen on his "associates". It seems that whenever he starts talking about them, I'm in for a bad time.
If you have the time, build it yourself. Getting something that 'just works' is fine and all, but you get a generic computer that is LCD (even when it comes to semi-professional workstations).
Invest the time and a little extra cash to custom tailor a workstation to your needs and you'll have a machine that is faster, more upgradable, and more reliable than the generic alternative. Just having a quality motherboard is 80% of the fight. Avoid products with cheap capacitors and gimmick technologies, you'll thank yourself later.
Just my $0.02.
How is your performance with ext3 on top of LVM? LVM is great in theory, but in practice, I've always found it 'feels' slow (I haven't tested the theory, but it seems well enough pronounced that I feel comfortable going with my intuition). I thought that it was just because the volumes were spread all over (increased seek time), but it seems slow even for short stroked volumes on top of RAID. I've tried everything - aligning my strides to the RAID array, different sized chunks, and every time the result is that LVM just feels clunky when compared to a file system running on top of bare metal. Have you experienced this at all?