The loom cluster in room 328 will be changing fast in the coming weeks.
The new porcupine PCs arrived yesterday from Dell. This morning I
learned the new subnet wire has reached room 324.
Room 328
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The entire cluster, the new PCs and what is there now, will be moving
from the front room, 328a, to the back right room, 328c. Right now 328c
contains shrimp (a sun-4 with Eagle disks that lab says have been
running since 1982), and the instructional alphas. These will be moving soon.
At the moment there is only one 110 circuit in that area so the move is
waiting on the electrical shop to come in and convert the 220 outlets that
run the sun and its disks into 110volt outlets. They say there are enough
circuits in the vicinity to cover 70+ machines. Around 50 machines will
be moving in at the start.
The new PCs
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The new PCs are PII/350MHz with 128MB and 4GB IDE disk. Their BIOS
settings can be changed remotely and they can network boot Windows and Linux.
They will all have X10 power controllers for remote power cycling.
So far I've confirmed you can remotely change BIOS boot device. I'm part way
through the remote linux boot procedures. I'll confirm that linux and
NT can be remotely booted and/or installed to the local disk.
The new subnet
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I don't know everything yet. I'm told C&C is now routing a new subnet
through the dept router, and the wiring is complete to room 324. The
hope is to put the entire cluster on its own subnet. There are not
quite enough IP addresses left on subnet 2 for all the new machines.
Timeline
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- finalize the eletical shop work request
- move shrimp and the instructional alphas
- get the eletrical work done
- get the network wire installed
- set up the new equipment (still waiting on the fast ether hub)
- remotely configure the new PCs to run NT (cross your fingers)
- confirm we can pack the old PCs on the new racks
- move the old PCs into 328C
References
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The loom and spin PC allocation page
file:/afs/cs/project/spin/www/Internal/Environment/Equipment/pcs.html
Lab host database page
http://www/lab/hinfo.html
Dell specs for the new PCs
http://support.dell.com/oti/systems/ban_gx1/Specs.htm
Dell Optiplex remote management features
http://www.dell.com/products/optiplex/benefits.htm