Alex Observes CuteOverload

Quotes: “IT’S A PUPPY IN A TEACUP!”
“WEASW-WEASW-WEASW!”
Video after the break.
Alex upon watching CuteOverload

Room 3086

My room-mate made a webpage of our dorm room for his class… wow.
http://people.rit.edu/~acg2802/webdesign/midterm/index.php

edit: He updated the page for his final project :-) http://people.rit.edu/~acg2802/webdesign/final/index.php

That’s some fast intertubes!

ITS /and/ I got bored. Gigabit uplinks go!

Faster than Fast Ethernet

So, I, uh got angry at how slow backing up my virtual machine from the NFS server was going. So, I uh, upgraded CSH-Net. A lot. The image follows…

Greater-than-fast-ethernet-speeds-ahoy!

A Tad Convoluted, But It Works

Awesome. I’m using my laptop’s fingerprint sensor to log into my server. Fingerprint Reader –> Laptop/Linux –> VMWare browser plugin W/USB device forwarding –> Server/Linux –> VMWare/Windows.

… makes me wonder why /everyone/ isn’t doing it this way :-)

GigaUpgrades

Just replaced south side of CSH with a brand-new (well, used… but new to us :-) ) Cisco 2960G gigabit network switch.
It’s all configured now to work with our aging, custom/in-house web-based IP management and tracking system.

Stay tuned for next week, during our appointment with ITS to upgrade our uplink to RIT’s network (and thus, the Internet-at-large) to gigabit speeds!

OMG SFP LOL

OpComm got some new sexy items in this week – we now have a pair of 1000LX/LH SFPs (one a cisco official, and one a clone) which we’ll be able to use to patch a line from South network to North network. Now, all I need to get in are some meter-long single mode fiber patch cables, and those two Cisco Catalyst 2960G-24TC switches we ordered, and we’re in business. :-)

On a related note, I’m swaaaaamped with work, both thanks to RIT and due to my incremental upgrades to get everything ready for the big move to gigabit, plus an unexpected power outage that temporarily sent the server room back into the stone age.

OpComm Goodies

OpComm got some new goodies in the mail today! 9 dual-gigabit PCI-X HP (Intel-chipset) server NICs for $5/each on ebay? Win.

It’s all part of OpComm’s current maniacal plans to upgrade the network (including uplinks to the internet) to gigabit speeds… and beyond!

Intel 8088 and IA64, with some Xen from Outer Space Inbetween

Made major progress (between the hours of 12AM and 6:30AM) this morning on getting the most recent pull of Bell Lab’s Plan 9 sources to work quite right under CSH’s Xen cluster (running Xen 3.3). Ethernet interface not currently working. That’d be nice to have. :-/

After that, though, I hope to port some house services over to a superior operating system :-)

I also got a book on 8088 assembly with which I hope to enhance the capabilities of our IBM PCJr. My roommate (Alex Grant, webmaster for CSH) started a BBS-like service for it, which is running in our room.

My friends Bob and Will are still convincing me to learn IA64 assembly and work with them porting plan9 to this platform… they may be crazy. That said, I’m on page 48 of an IA64 reference guide :-) It’s a pretty sweet architecture, really, but there are quite a few “gotchas” for assembly programmers that I could see making writing compilers and kernels hard. Ah well.

On the Care and Feeding of Servers

Dealt with a lot of computer issues today – woke up at 5:30am or so with Angelo Dinardi and Chris Deslandes to pop over to CSH’s server room, and safely power down/disconnect our equipment before RIT took down their electrical grid to tie in a new transformer.
Our move of physically disconnecting our machines from the wall was a good one – We lost an AC unit when power came back on, likely due to a power spike. A few services didn’t start up, and many user rack machines refused had issues, but all in all, I would say the experience was not all so bad.

Angelo and I took the chance to do some tidying up of cabling and reracking some of the servers in a better layout, that worked out pretty well.

Angelo was the one who got to push the big red button to cut power to the three-phase power to the server racks… this time. He looked back on his experiences of power outages of OpComm’s past… someday, he thought, he would be the older RTP who had the privilege of hitting the infamous Red Button… and so he was. Someday, Internet, it will be my turn to push the Red Button. Someday.
(Probably next year :-P Don’t tell Chris!)

Also, hey, got to talk to a lot of alumni today.
… when their user rack machines didn’t turn back on. Ah well.