21 January 2006, 15:28 by mark hoekstra

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

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