(no subject)
Acivities recently:
* Have messed about with the computer stuff at my mums house, which I'm staying in at the moment. Mum graciously lets me run a couple of computers at her place, while I'm away, which do various things. Historically, I've always run off-site backups to her house (to a machine uninventively called 'backup'), but since my place is only online via a 3g connection now, I pay by the megabyte - so I don't run backups for anything apart from the 'really important' stuff.
* Am playing with host monitoring software at the moment, Nagios.
* Downloading around 2650 MPEG videos from a pr0n paysite I joined a couple weeks ago.
* Have set up a small compute cluster, mainly because I like such things. There are five machines of around 1Ghz, running disklessly. They boot via PXE and root-over-NFS. Going to set them up running distcc for now. They're mainly there for when I find time to write my ninja security scanner, which I think will take a decent amount of CPU power. Might keep them busy by generating rainbow tables on them later.
* Had a PSU blowout earlier. Big bang, flash of light, and a funny smell. Opened the ex-PSU to try to see what the damage was, but couldn't see anything out of the ordinary. Quite pleased it happened now, and not in a few weeks when I'd left the house.
* Been hunting cluster nodes on ebay. One guy was selling 40 systems, each a 1U p3 866, for £350. Mailed him for a quote, did some sums to figure out how much power I'd need, convinced myself it was doable - then someone else bought it first. Arse!
* Should really leave buying big additions to the cluster until I've written the security scanner and actually need it. Depreciation can work in my favour for once.
* Mike - Uni friend - has offered the 'long-term loan' of a couple Fibre Channel enclosures and associated disks. FC switches are actually really cheap on ebay, and I fancy the idea of setting up shared-medium access to an FC array. I've never used it before, though - I imagine it will thrash the pants off gigE, but I'm open to your speculations! Finally, does anyone know if it's possible to buy copper 9pin GBICs? Apparently his FC box is copper.
* Nodes will all be off until I power them up via WoL. Considering tunnelling my house with mums, and settin gup some automatic 'horsepower on demand' via MOSIX. Mosix seems fairly unstable, though, and openMosix seems like it's a bit unmaintained. (I've just googled, and openMosix is abandoned/'on hold'. How very sad :()
* Computers are stupidly cheap nowadays. Dual 3Ghz xeon/4gb ram/etc for around the £150 mark on ebay. And that's branded (Dell, from memory). Seriously.
* I must make a mental note to include mention of cluster stuff when I apply for jobs/postgrad places.
* Have messed about with the computer stuff at my mums house, which I'm staying in at the moment. Mum graciously lets me run a couple of computers at her place, while I'm away, which do various things. Historically, I've always run off-site backups to her house (to a machine uninventively called 'backup'), but since my place is only online via a 3g connection now, I pay by the megabyte - so I don't run backups for anything apart from the 'really important' stuff.
* Am playing with host monitoring software at the moment, Nagios.
* Downloading around 2650 MPEG videos from a pr0n paysite I joined a couple weeks ago.
* Have set up a small compute cluster, mainly because I like such things. There are five machines of around 1Ghz, running disklessly. They boot via PXE and root-over-NFS. Going to set them up running distcc for now. They're mainly there for when I find time to write my ninja security scanner, which I think will take a decent amount of CPU power. Might keep them busy by generating rainbow tables on them later.
* Had a PSU blowout earlier. Big bang, flash of light, and a funny smell. Opened the ex-PSU to try to see what the damage was, but couldn't see anything out of the ordinary. Quite pleased it happened now, and not in a few weeks when I'd left the house.
* Been hunting cluster nodes on ebay. One guy was selling 40 systems, each a 1U p3 866, for £350. Mailed him for a quote, did some sums to figure out how much power I'd need, convinced myself it was doable - then someone else bought it first. Arse!
* Should really leave buying big additions to the cluster until I've written the security scanner and actually need it. Depreciation can work in my favour for once.
* Mike - Uni friend - has offered the 'long-term loan' of a couple Fibre Channel enclosures and associated disks. FC switches are actually really cheap on ebay, and I fancy the idea of setting up shared-medium access to an FC array. I've never used it before, though - I imagine it will thrash the pants off gigE, but I'm open to your speculations! Finally, does anyone know if it's possible to buy copper 9pin GBICs? Apparently his FC box is copper.
* Nodes will all be off until I power them up via WoL. Considering tunnelling my house with mums, and settin gup some automatic 'horsepower on demand' via MOSIX. Mosix seems fairly unstable, though, and openMosix seems like it's a bit unmaintained. (I've just googled, and openMosix is abandoned/'on hold'. How very sad :()
* Computers are stupidly cheap nowadays. Dual 3Ghz xeon/4gb ram/etc for around the £150 mark on ebay. And that's branded (Dell, from memory). Seriously.
* I must make a mental note to include mention of cluster stuff when I apply for jobs/postgrad places.