Re: FC2 SPARC status.

On Friday 30 January 2004 01:41 pm, Tom 'spot' Callaway wrote:
> leaves the problem of where do we get big iron from. Sun certainly isn't
> jumping to donate Starfires, or anything for that matter. However, we do
> have some medium sized UltraSPARC machines in the Red Hat basement,
> thanks to our various acquisitions. I've got one of our employees
> looking into gettting these machines up and on the network.

I'll repeat my offer of before.  I have almost 30 Sun Ultra 30's, all with 
248MHz processors and 128MB of RAM and a 4.2G HD each.  If someone can set up 
the distcc stuff for Aurora 1.0 (+updates), I'll put all of them up on a 
private VLAN off our LAN, give spot and a few others ssh access, and you 
would be free to use them as a buildfarm.  I might need a little help with 
the initial physical setup; we have volunteer weekends once a month, and I 
work every Saturday.  We are located in North Carolina, within a 6-8 hour 
drive from Red Hat's HQ.  I have UPS capability.  I would love to get them 
set up as a cluster ANYWAY, and a minor bit of bandwidth (I can't in clear 
conscience say that my T1 pipe is big enough to function as a mirror pipe) 
uploading/downloading from the master repo wouldn't be a problem.

> Of course, we need to have a modern tree just to get it into the
> buildsystem. Which is what I've been working on.

Unfortunately there is little externally visible progress on that.

> Of course, one of the biggest obstacles is that the sparc32 2.6 kernel
> is really in a sorry state. The maintainer still needs to fix modules.
> (Yes, modules don't load at all.) This is vital unless everyone wants to
> netboot giant monolithic kernels, since SILO has size restrictions for
> sparc32. Feel free to poke Keith M Wesolowski <[email protected]>
> and offer any and all bribery at your disposal to help expedite this
> process. :)

Do we really need to be held back for sparc32?  Can the sparc64 users get 
something we can use without being held back?  I'd like to have just a Fedora 
Core _1_ available, and that's with the 2.4 kernel.  The key for me and my 
friend is Apache 2.0 and PHP4.  But getting out of an EOL base distribution 
would be nice, since errata for RH7.3 are hard to get now.  Sure, having the 
2.6 kernel and ipsectools would make my day, but that's not the big point.  
The big point is for me on the server, although I am using and will continue 
to be using a few U30s and a pair of U10's as workstations, primarily for VNC 
control of remote windows boxes.  For those machines a modern browser is key.  
They will also be running either kstars or XEphem with the INDI library for 
remote telescope control.  But kstars doesn't exist in Aurora 1.0, and won't 
have INDI support until KDE 3.2, which might have a chance of getting into 
FC2.  I also do things with a couple of small astronomical toolkits: AIPS++ 
for radio telescope deconvolution and IRAF for optical telescope image 
reduction.

It is very possible that our site's Director of Astromical Research and 
Education may reduce images from Hubble on one of these boxes, if I can get 
them modernized in time.

> But yeah, I'm making progress. All of my outstanding sparc kernel fixes
> but one have been committed upstream.

I've been noticing that on the sparclinux kernel list.  Interesting reading.

> As soon as I have something that people can do alpha testing on, i will
> spray it out there.

Spray away.  I have boxen to play with.
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu

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