geektechniques first ever ***weekend poll***
Well… I think this is just about time… sometimes I feel like blogging all kinds of stuff (besides the things I do myself) and on other times I’m too busy with projects and other stuff to be blogging… This behaviour produces a very inconsistently updated blog-part of this site… But is a consistently updated blog what you guys want? I mean, it’s impossible for me to fill this with my own geekery every day (even though I’d love too). So… to find out, I installed this poll! :D
As a matter of fact, because of all the things I’m involved in lately, it more or less happened that I’m not blogging as frequently as I want to. Yesterday I was looking at a raw live-log of this server and there are a lot of RSS-aggregators visiting this site, to check on updates… So… that had me thinking… is there an interest in the blog-part of this site, with the links Nijne and me like best (those are not necessarily the same *^_^* )?
And of course, you can leave a comment if you will (you’ll get to see the results when you vote and pssst… you can vote again every hour…) :-)
Blue Led Mouse, one more time
Well… this is something I made over a year ago and a little while ago I put the ‘how-to’ inside my current content-management system (and rewrote it for a part). Actually I put it inside my current CMS for testing purposes and such, call it an experiment. It can be found if you really strawl through this page(I knew that)... Now the last couple of days people start linking to it, so that’s why I’m putting it down here now… Maybe it’s useful to somebody, I don’t know.
click image to go to the how-to
san-x
seeing mark covered a LOT of hardware stuff lately i figured it was time for something cute (**)
san-x is TOTALLY kawaii
meet kogepan for instance.
he smokes a lot, drinks milk like beer and is very pessimistic
read more about him here
and then there is relaxbear!
san-x has a few other weird characters like a riceball sushi family, a whole parasite family, and chestnut boys :D
be sure to check out the san-x website
and san-x partner website kawaiigifts.com
<3
(how much kawaiiness can one take!?)
even more Sun...
“Oh no!!! Please talk about something else! please please pretty please with sugar on top???”
Well, I’ll try, but at this moment I’m gonna bore you with a nice Sun promotional video from 2001… :D
click to go to the video (183MB)
click to go to the video (183MB)
Please also pay a visit to the generous host of the video, http://hardware.localhost.nl/
There’s tons of pictures of (older) hardware and other stuff too…
For instance, this one has me snickering every once in a while… euhm… never mind ;-)
One of them even made it to my desk :D
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decisions have been made, the pile is divided
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Today is the third day I’ve been playing around with this enormous pile of Sun hardware. Things have come down and I guess the decisions on what goes where are pretty final.
On the pic above you see the once-will-be cluster ingredients. It’s an Ultra2 with one 200MHz CPU, 384MB as masternode and 5 times an Ultra1, 167MHz each and 128MB each. I still had this old 3Com manageable switch with 100Mbit uplink (which will go to the U2, which has 100MBit onboard LAN) and 10Mbit on each port (which will go to the 10MBit onboard LANs of the U1s). Then I also have this Shiva Atom console server. It’s gonna be quite a job to make all cables for that, but when I will, it’ll be one nice little cluster. Slow, but who cares? :D (I just want to play around a little with parallel computing)
Then, the two machines in my closet are two U1s out of the stack, also 167MHz each, but the nicest thing is, these 167Mhz models don’t have a CPU-fan. Both have 256MB, which is ridiculous, but well… I’ll see if I’m gonna change that when I have the cluster running (which can take quite a while, I need time and motivation to get going on that project…).
I made one of my 143MHz-machines a router for my colleague John, I’m installing it right now, it’s got 64MB and an extra 10MBit Sbus-card. And in my collection of Suns, that still leaves me with an U2 with 2×200MHz and 512MB… I guess I’m gonna install Solaris on that one…
In the end I only have left one chassis, an old 143MHz-one, which now is without memory and it already had a crappy CPU-fan, so that one’s for scrap…
Pfffff… I guess I’ve seen enough Suns for now :D time to clean up…
getting along with the pile
Even though I’d been busy with my router and bridge this week, I knew I had to pull everything loose just one more time with this stack of hardware to choose from… So, here we went… :D
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My router and bridge, I took the freshest looking U1s of the stack, the fans of the PSU didn’t have any dust on them, they both have around 70 powercycles each (according to the OpenBoot Prom). I stacked them full with memory, not really useful at the moment, but well… 256MB each is nice and I’ll see if I can use it somehow…
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Terminaloutput (on my eMate) and the fresh U1s in my closet
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Here you can see my eMate this evening with a very long serial cable to do some adjustments and the stack of good-to-go U1s which will probably be the nodes in my soon-to-build cluster. I moved the two old 143MHz U1s which came out of my closet and one of the U1s of the big pile to my hallway… I guess I’m going to ditch those… no memory, nothing in there…
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And the final setup… with an eMate as emergency terminal :D
For those interested (are there any? ;-))... I will be writing up my experiences with a dual bridge… But my experiences only start now… I’ve been hardware-geeking for a loooong time before I had this setup, but I guess I have a pretty ideal packet filter setup, especially since my router is also running OpenBSD… Although the idea behind the dual bridge is one, that you can put anything in between… I’d like to get my hands on a proper Cisco, but Ciscos with anything near some proper 2006-broadband-throughput is way out-of-my-league budgetwise…
getting my head around the pile
Well… even though it seems like a geek’s dream to pick up this amount of Sun hardware, it also keeps puzzling me how to make proper use of it… :D:D:D
First of all, I’m gonna start of making my router+dual-bridge-setup totally ideal… that means more memory (not that it needed that, but since I have the modules, why not?) and the last Happy Meal-card, so the router will have 2 separate SBUS Happy Meal-cards, for a theoretical throughput of 100MBit and the dual bridge already had a wonderful quad happy meal SBUS card, so the whole line-up will have a theoretical thoughput of 100MBit. Not that I imagine I’m gonna need that, but with ADSL2+ around the corner, breaking the 10MBit-barrier, it’s nice to have things sorted out :D
Next to that, I’m pretty sure I’m gonna build a cluster of the rest of the hardware. Not something I planned on doing, but I’ve got all the hardware laying around, so why not? I guess I’m gonna make an Ultra 2 (the single CPU one) the masternode, and connect a couple of U1s, which I’m gonna netboot from the U2, to that. I also got a console-switch which I don’t use (a Shiva Atom) so I can geek around making the cables for all that. Not that it’s gonna be fast or anything, but having a cluster is just one of those magical things, hardly imaginable having it at your own home and this way, the stack of hardware is not even that big(...). It most definitely won’t be a cluster which I’m gonna run 24/7, but just a fun stack of hardware for the geek-around-weekends :D
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Anyways, after less than a day, I already changed the speakerstand-setup… I didn’t like the way it looked and I guess I gain enough by the way I put’em down now. It looks better (imho), it’s less fragile and I don’t hear any difference (but I judged very quickly). The big problem with my stereo was the height of the front speakers. I’m not planning on doing listening tests to decide which setup sounds better. It sounds better now than without any speakerstand, so this it’s gonna be…
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Yes… that’s a lot of SCSI-disks… :D
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...now don’t even tempt me to make VU-meters out of those leds… :D
the big pile is here! *^_^*
The big pile is here! ...and I mean …geez…
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I picked this pile up with my friend Rutger this morning, in his Subaru Legacy, which is an excellent car.
Anyways, I didn’t know up front what it would be, and I have to get my mind around this pile to make up what to do with it. It’s seven Ultra 1s and an Ultra 2 (with one CPU), a couple of SCSI-cabinets and three tapedrives.
I already had 2 Ultra 1s and an Ultra 2, the Ultra 1 is my favourite platform for OpenBSD, for doing all kinds of (networking) tasks and now I got enough parts to build the machines I want to use to spectacular specification. Honestly I thought/hoped up front that there would be an E250 or such, but on the other hand, OpenBSD can only use one CPU now and I already got everything covered in my network. At this moment I wouldn’t really have a proper task for an E250/450. With this pile I have extra Happy Meal cards to make my dual bridge + router totally 100MBit and I was running short on SCA-drives, but that’s more than covered now… :-)
I have to inspect this pile this weekend to see how much memory and such is in there, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got enough now :D
UPDATE
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I immediately started refurbishing this big pile. I cleaned out the SCSI-cabinets and took out the hard-drives (twelve in total). Now I used the cabinets to finally get my speakers from the floor. This is something I had planned for a long time, tweeters need to be somewhere around the same height as your ears and even though I’m still pleased with my front speakers, I’m not sitting on the floor listening to them :D
Anyways, this may not be to everyone’s taste, but I can tell you my stereo sounds like never before, it’s a BIG difference I can tell you.
So… this weekend I’ll be going through the machines (already started it), first impression looks good. The two U1s I opened up have passively cooled CPUs and that’s where my old U1s go wrong after about a year. I have to put them out to clean and oil the CPU-fan. I haven’t connected anyone of them to a terminal yet, that’s something I’m gonna do right now :D
dual bridge is running! *^_^*
You probably can tell I’m very busy lately, judging by the lack of posts on my blog. Anyways, this night I finally had some time again to geek around and so I did!
With my new found VT100-terminal, I picked up installing my second Sun Ultra 1 (Enterprise, which is only a badge, but a very nice one :-)). Building a dual transparent ethernet-bridge has become a long term project, I didn’t come very far this evening. Well, at least I have it up & running but that’s about it. I guess I can spend time in packetfilter-configuration from now on… :-)
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Screenshot from my workstation… hme0-3 is my quad happy meal sbuscard, which makes up for the dual bridge.
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Oh, and before anyone asks questions. I’m not so sure what benefits I can get from running a dual bridge, one before NAT and one after… There are a few that come to mind, but somehow I hope to do some interesting discoveries :-)
Oh, and if you like Sun-hardware, make sure you check back here soon (like this friday afternoon for instance…) :D I can’t tell you what it is, cause I don’t know yet, but I need a big car to pick it up…
Apple Newton eMate 300 is an excellent terminal!
The other day I picked up two Apple eMates 300… I needed those for some other project, of which you’ll hear about soon. :D I still have them laying around and I wanted to do some work on some of the Sun-machinery I have here (and probably more on it’s way, but more on that later too)...
Anyways, none of my Suns have a graphics card and I tend to like it that way. But my favourite (and only) serial terminal I used for connecting to Suns (and other gear), a Mac Classic II is acting up(I have to wait 2 hours+ before it boots) and totally unusable if I want to do something quick. So tonight I figured out how to use one of my Newtons for just that and it’s pretty excellent! (imho) weeee!
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And the only thing I had to do was setting some variables (using ‘printenv’ and ‘setenv’) and then type ‘boot’ ...
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Next thing I’m gonna use this Newton for is a complete OpenBSD-installation on one of the other Suns… weeee!
My Apple Newton eMate must be the hippest serial terminal on the block! (and the only one too… considering the people in my neighbourhood…)
