[OINK-PUG Members] Old Electronics Needed

cjdavis · November 16, 2009, 5:24pm

Elizabeth,

Stage one is dismantling everything he can get his hands on. Stage two is actually putting them back together. Not until stage three are the reassembled items expected to be at least semi-functional

Yes, Hive13 is a great fit for your son. You do not need to be a member to just come visit and check things out when members are in the space - most nights of the week somebody is there. Anyone under 18 does need to have a parent / guardian present.

Our general meetings are every Tuesday at 7:30, so that might be a good time to take a look around and meet people.

Ammar,

We’d be more than happy to take any extra computers off your hands for re-purposing - currently a member is creating a low-performance parallel computing cluster for example, and there are always other projects in the works.

-Chris

hodapp_test · November 17, 2009, 1:42pm

HEY! "low-performance parallel computing cluster"? I take issue with
that term.
Parallel computing implies that each node in the cluster computes
concurrently, which so far is only true if "crashes" is a proper
interpretation of "computes".

Chris · November 17, 2009, 3:42pm

speaking of crashes, do we have a working PXE boot server on the network yet?

Karl_Wilbur · November 17, 2009, 4:05pm

No. I’m working on it…albeit very slowly.

Karl_Wilbur · November 17, 2009, 6:17pm

Stupid Linksys doesn’t know from PXE. Grrr…I’m making a Smoothwall. I’ll handle the reconfig of the network as well. If anyone has network hosts that need static addresses, please let me know. I’ll start a new email thread, wave and wiki page for network configuration.

I have the server at 192.168.1.2 and jumped through all the goofy Linksys/Westell hoops to get external SSH access. It’s ugly but works until I can get the network setup with more intelligent software.

Paul · November 17, 2009, 6:31pm

Will the smoothwall handle the routing? So basically the linksys will just be an AP?

Karl_Wilbur · November 17, 2009, 6:46pm

Yup. And I’ll turn off all the Westell crap. I can have a DMZ setup if desired.

cjdavis · November 17, 2009, 9:11pm

Ha! So if low-performance is no good, we need a different name. Developmentally-disabled?

Also, knowing that they are Pentium I, WIndows95 type Dells that Ammar has, do we want any of them?

Karl_Wilbur · November 18, 2009, 2:43am

PXE boot of ubuntu installer may be working. I am working on adding more ubuntu images (currently downloading the Internet). DBAN, Memtest86, and friends to follow.

Chris · November 18, 2009, 5:36am

w00t. thanks karl!

int_eighty · November 18, 2009, 1:02pm

Excellent, Karl! Thank you so much for setting that up :]

Paul · November 18, 2009, 3:27pm

For those that dont know how PXE boot works, what do you need to do to utilize it? and what can you do with it?

Craig · November 18, 2009, 3:30pm

Choose network boot and check out the h4wt new DBAN release!

jk, don't do that.

Chris · November 18, 2009, 3:44pm

no go ahead, just make sure you are using someone else’s computer

Paul · November 18, 2009, 4:07pm

Hey, ChrisA, can I see your laptop for a moment?

Paul · November 18, 2009, 4:08pm

I also hear that “sudo rm -rf /” can fix almost anything on a linux box.

int_eighty · November 18, 2009, 4:44pm

If it's Debian-based, you need /*

Craig · November 18, 2009, 4:44pm

That's a lie!!!

It's "sudo rm -rf /*"

You can get an error if you forget the *

hodapp_test · November 19, 2009, 12:50am

I don't think they'd be of much use for a cluster because they're just
too slow. We may want to take a couple of them because throwaway
Pentiums can be great for some things, like underclocked fanless boxes
for simple servers, or to drive some serial/parallel device, or to use
old DOS software that is very picky about hardware.
Chris Anderson also had expressed some interest in having a cluster
that actually worked so that we could have an easy method of
generating virtual machines where (for instance) someone could have a
root shell to test something with no risk of screwing anything up
outside the VM, or run virtual appliances easily, or various other
things. And I'm sure any unused CPU cycles could go to plenty of other
things - e.g., distcc, rendering for Blender/RenderMan/POV-Ray, BOINC,
whatever. If we're lucky, maybe it'll even be faster than people just
using their laptops.
While we don't have any particularly fast hardware at the moment, we
do have a pile of dual Pentium III boxes that aren't being used. We
could make a frontend node on something with enough SCSI disks for
decent RAID (could even be that bigass Dell monstrosity with the dual
Pentium Pros) and use it for netboot & shared NFS root on the slave
nodes.

cjdavis · November 19, 2009, 12:55am

Ok, sounds like we could make use of them, I’ll let Ammar know. Thanks!