I finally decided that enough was enough, and I ordered the parts for my new
server. This means that in the next week or two, I will be replacing the
good ol' dual Athlon (see below for specs), with a shiny new quad-core Xeon.
Current setup - baal:
| 2x |
AMD Athlon MP 1800+ (1.533 GHz, 256 KB cache) |
| 2x |
40GB IDE disk |
| 4x |
512 MB |
| 1x |
e1000 Intel NIC |
New setup - odin:
I've "stolen" some images of the case from NewEgg:
Baal gives me about 40 GB of disk space (I use RAID 1 across the two
drives). Odin will give me about 6TB (RAID 6). This will finally allow me
to do a few things I wanted to do for a while; one such thing is to provide
a Hercules image with Linux set up to do
HVF development.
The other night, just before midnight, STS-128 launched. I took a few
screenshots of NASA TV. NASA described the launch as:
Liftoff from Launch Pad 39A was on time at 11:59 p.m. EDT. The first launch
attempt on Aug. 24 was postponed due to unfavorable weather conditions. The
second attempt on Aug. 25 also was postponed due to an issue with a valve in
space shuttle Discovery's main propulsion system.
The STS-128 mission is the 30th International Space Station assembly flight
and the 128th space shuttle flight. The 13-day mission will deliver more
than 7 tons of supplies, science racks and equipment, as well as additional
environmental hardware to sustain six crew members on the International
Space Station. The equipment includes a freezer to store research samples, a
new sleeping compartment and the COLBERT treadmill.
Here's the "beenie cap" with the moon in the background:
A nice shot of the whole shuttle:
The engines:
Beenie cap being retracted before launch
Later on, I found this image on NASA's site. Wow.
(original link)
Viewed from the Banana River Viewing Site at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in
Florida, space shuttle Discovery arcs through a cloud-brushed sky, lighted
by the trail of fire after launch on the STS-128 mission.
I was just watching the STS-127 launch. I couldn't help but take a couple of
screenshots of NASA TV...
Right after solid rocket booster separation:
The fuel tank, and separation:
And, it looks like NASA has a nice photo of the launch:
Ooooh... looks like some folks are very serious about shredding ...
their disks.
(original)
I'm going to lose an email address I had for a long while:
jeffpc@optonline.net. It's because of an ISP switch. I haven't used it as
my primary email address for a long while, but either way, you'll want to
update my contact info to jeffpc@josefsipek.net.
Wow, it's about time!
Sources tell me
that RHEL 5.4 comes with XFS support. This is good news
for all those folks wanting to use filesystems larger than 16TB and not
trusting ext4 with their data (I couldn't blame them). As far as I know,
these unfortunate souls have been told to use GFS2 if they wanted a RH
supported fs that did more than 16TB. (It's worth mentioning that ext3 had a
8TB limit until about two years ago, when it got fixed up to support whopping
16TB.)
I can't belive this...These TV show writers really have to be trying to get
things wrong.
I just learned about a rather non-technical description of the Kerberos
authentication service:
Designing an
Authentication System: a Dialogue in Four Scenes.
It makes me feel like I should set up Kerberos on my boxes...not sure if
it's even worth it, considering that I deal with no more than 3 computers
(laptop, desktop, server).
I just came across
an article
that points out how Goldman Sachs managed to show a fair amount of profit
for the first quarter:
Goldman Sachs reported a profit of $1.8 billion in the first quarter, and
plans to sell $5 billion in stock and get out of the government’s clutches,
if it can.
How did it do that? One way was to hide a lot of losses in not-so-plain
sight.
Goldman’s 2008 fiscal year ended Nov. 30. This year the company is switching
to a calendar year. The leaves December as an orphan month, one that will be
largely ignored. In Goldman’s earnings statement, and in most of the news
reports, the quarter ended March 31 is compared to the quarter last year
that ended in February.
The orphan month featured — surprise — lots of write-offs. The pretax loss
was $1.3 billion, and the after-tax loss was $780 million.
Would the firm have had a profit if it had stuck to its old calendar, and
had to include December and exclude March?
Clever, eh?
Do you know what's better than snow? Snow in April. Yep, that's right,
there was a reasonable amount of snowfall overnight. I just wish I had time
to go around, and photograph things.
