A glimpse of what's to come

I just received word that the final components for the new cluster have been ordered by the computing center. Hopefully we will receive our new ethernet switch (1000BASE-SX, kind of neat) and necessary patch cables (for both the ethernet and the fiber channel) sometime next week. There is still a lot to do before then, so don't forget to check back this Sunday for an update!

Also, as I promised earlier, I'm thinking about how to write up a post on the "Tech" of the Quadcast. I can't promise something polished right now, but essentially we have a 'retired' Sun Ultra 5 workstation (the CS department is trying to get rid of them, they were formerly arranged as 'cluster 2,' which has been out of service for several years and is now profoundly obsolete) configured with cron and a streamripper (actually called 'streamripper). It's running Debian Etch, and lives on campus here at Trinity. Files are captured automatically by this system, quickly edited with Audacity, and then thrown up on some webspace allocated to students on Shakti (an ancient unix server). We'll probably have to switch to another system soon, as these large MP3s are probably rather conspicuous.

-AJB.

P.S. - A brief interlude
The actual technical specifications of Shakti are a mystery to me. But, it is worth pointing out that at the very least it is impressively old. This suggests that the system has been online at least since 1997. It's uname -a output seems to support this dating as well

SunOS shakti x.x Generic_xxxxx-xx sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2 Solaris.

Am I to believe that Shakti is a sun4u series Ultra 2 machine? So far as I know, there was only one variety of these ever made -- the A14 "pulsar." According to this nifty website, such a machine would be of approximately equivalent if not slightly lower power to the Ultra 5 machines that the CS department is now cannibalizing for our various side projects (such as powering the Quadcast).