Where every idea ends up being the worst idea you have ever had
and yet you can not seem to let go.
Various systems are running and available to the right sort of geeks.
Stuff running :
hostname architecture operating system
------------------------------------------------------------
hydra AMD64 FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p3
This is a mixture of SATA and SAS disk storage hacked
together. Actual black electrical tape is involved as
well as spinning fans hanging on loose wires. No case.
Propped up on corks from Chimay beer.
update : hydra now lays on the
floor in a corner. Still
is propped up on some Chimay beer corks and that
works.
Perfectly pretty at night. Flashing SAS
lights and such. No RGB. Go away with your RGB
unless you are
Jesse Shanahan and then you can go
full on bonkers cool to the max!
hostname architecture operating system
------------------------------------------------------------
esther i686 FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p3
Some crazy details : This is a bonkers little motherboard that
just refuses to die!
This is a
flame proof JetWay board !
Actually this is a
VIA Eden Esther processor on a tiny
little
motherboard I found in a closet somewhere. Was
wrapped in old socks. Has a massive 1GB of memory as well
as the cutest little itty bitty power supply called a
pico PSU. Also
she is screwed to a wall and duct
tape holding the cpu fan in place for testing.
update : now runs FreeBSD 13 and we discovered a speaker
on the thing. It can make noises.
The truely strange thing is that I did discover
where the performance problem really exists. I did not
have flashing leds on it.
Anywhere. I have found the real
solution -->
well there is your problem
All one really needs is the Turbo Led. Get yours today!
Expect me to offer the Turbo Led as a product real soon!
Get yours! Do a pre-order! Don't miss out on a totally cool
led that may or may not actually work but that is why you
pre-order five of them !
Optional warning label may read :
"gefingerpoken and watchen das blinkenlights on der turbo-led!"
Operators are standing by. Have your Credit card ready.
Face East. Under a full moon and with a Jazz black cat
on your mothers birthday.
Note that funds for pre-orders will go directly to beer
research investments : https://paypal.me/genunix
DO NOT EXPECT ANYTHING and often NOTHING is what will happen.
However having said all that I can tell you that all funds
go to a really great place. Really.
hostname architecture operating system
------------------------------------------------------------
io armv7l Weird Linaro Linux
This is the original
ASUS TinkerBoard and it seems to
run really well. Fast in fact. Except the storage is some
trash SDIMM that was stuck on my desk. I scraped off the
food bits and stuck it into the TinkerBoard. Seems to
work just fine but is hellish confused about what a long
double floating point datatype is. Also has a fan wired
to a few GPIO pins that seems to provide 5 volts. Just to
toss a little storage on the thing I plugged in a Kingston
Memory USB thumbdrive ( do people still say that? ) on the
thing. Storage is a disaster slow horrible affair on these
little small board System on a Chip SBC crappers. That also
means the Raspberry Pi sucks for the same reason.
hostname architecture operating system
------------------------------------------------------------
enceladus ppc64 * * * dead * * *
W A R N I N G : Gentoo may have killed this machine!
Gentoo may have *also* killed the
backup machine.
After building Gentoo with full debug options.... there
was a brief reboot and the cooling system went bonkers.
Fans and colling pumps were at maximum and in an hour
the machine halted. Died. Would never boot again. No
doubt there were some serious problems with thermal
monitoring and management in the kernel and modules that
were built. Sad but true. Should have stayed with Debian?
Named after the coolest moon in our solar system by a
seriously cool genius
Jesse Shanahan. This monster just
never fails. Runs big endian ppc64 on an old Apple G5
powermac with dual liquid cooling fans and dual hard
disks. It can crank out a bootstrap of GCC 12.x in 16
hours and then crank the entire Linux 5.19.0 kernel in
maybe 90 minutes. Brilliant beautiful hardware. Has the
strange feature of turning into a windfarm under load.
One of the very few big endian machines running and it
often discovers bugs in other peoples software. Mostly
because a lot of open source projects have "works for me"
attitude on some Linux x86 boxen and then SHIP IT out
to production! Then the software blows up on big endian.
hostname architecture operating system
------------------------------------------------------------
spartacus sparcv9 Oracle Solaris 11.3
I hate Larry. I call the Oracle sales line over and over
and can have a fistful of money and they never return my
call. What the hell! I just want the damn boxen to run
and to get some updates as needed. Damn it. To be entirely
honest this machine was made by Fujitsu and the thing is
a workhorse that can thrash mathematics better than any other
damn machine I have. It does know how to do Fused Multiply
and Add in one operation. Even better it can use registers
in the number of four. This is FMA4 baby! The thing rocks
the math but can never get a software or firmware update.
The Lawnmower Man says "no". NOTE: I love SPARC hardware.
hostname architecture operating system
------------------------------------------------------------
nix sparc Sun Solaris 8
The wonderful room heater that I call nix is actually a dual
processor
Sun SPARCStation 20. It runs Solaris 8 with all of
the up to date patches and I can tell you it is rock solid
stable. The only hassle to deal with is the darn battery which
some hardware design fool placed inside a NVRAM chip. Really?
Therefore the battery has died years ago but I need that NVRAM
chip even if the power on sequence reveals borked up contents
for some of the NVRAM data. Easy to fix. No problem. Some cool
folks have gone so far as to
hack a modern battery holder onto
the ROM chip. Entirely too much work for me!
hostname architecture operating system
------------------------------------------------------------
mimas AMD64 NetBSD 9.3
This is an old Lenovo STinkPad that refuses to die. It has
very little in the way of horsepower compared to modern
systems but plenty if you run a nice lean UNIX or Linux.
So therefore it made good sense to have a NetBSD machine
somewhere in the pile. Who knows what pain may happen when
we try to build software on NetBSD ? Thus far a GCC 12.2.0
bootstrap has been met with
a few problems but they should
be fixable. In fact that problem has been fixed. Seems that
GNU Patch is required for the -Z option. Good luck.
hostname architecture operating system
------------------------------------------------------------
callisto x86_64 barely FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p1
Found in a trash bin to be tossed out. There were five of
these little black Lenovo boxes heaped in there. I fished
out the ones that did not have raccoons playing DOOM2 and
after some beer was able to build this unit. The thing has
a spinning disk and an Intel Core 2 Duo thing. It does
run FreeBSD like a champion killer and also with ZFS man!
Yes there is the
LAST DAMN AWESOME filesystem E V E R here
on a little black box in the corner. A treasure as it just
runs and never seems to falter. Also, yes, ZFS cures the last
problem we care about in life. Ultimate storage. Crazy idea
that you can save data to a filesystem and it will still be
there when you want it later. It will even be the same data
that did not just melt away like btr.
hostname architecture operating system
------------------------------------------------------------
pollux sparcv9 Solaris 10
This is one of those long lost endlessly working Netra boxen
that Sun Microsystems made with hands of angels and blessed
with gossamer strands of rainbows. It will never die. I have
carefully hand crafted some software therein but I shall never
be worthy of the Gods that created this cathedral. Getting
a compiler for this from Oracle requires terrible services in
some dark alley with Larry. I will not go there. Nope.
hostname architecture operating system
------------------------------------------------------------
styx x86_64 FreeBSD 14.0-CURRENT
We try to deal with difficult situations and things that won't
make any reasonable sense. Imagine, if you will, in a silent
moment, a person in a corner that will come out fighting like
Rhonda Rousey. A disaster of fury and power and also will be
beautiful in the moment. This is FreeBSD CURRENT. Say it. Say
the word quietly under your breath. Current. The river flows
and you are in the water and this is the machine that builds
with the latest code from FreeBSD. This is ZFS and top of the
line latest UNIX goodness. This is a battleship of power that
can serve.
Sadly, it can not do math. At least not until a
person with endless hours can pour over the code in strtod.
I find it odd that the
GlibC folks bit into this problem like
vulture on a meat wagon. This machine cranks out a new kernel
and buildworld frequently.
hostname architecture operating system
------------------------------------------------------------
thor ppc64le POWER9 dream
So I talked with these guys who said I can live just fine with
part of my liver missing and also one kidney. This is a perfectly
reasonable trade to get POWER9 in my life. Oh how I love the
heavy IBM hardware. Someone please take me back to the mainframe
clusters and the SNA3270 goodness. Dreams of JCL and COBOL and
awesome FORTRAN-IV. The days when we pushed rockets and jets and
metals bearings to the limits of material faith. These nice guys
in great dark suits say I can give up a kidney and just a small
part of my liver ( sadly abused ) to get a POWER9 server. Please
help me. A Raptor Blackbird would be nice here.
hostname architecture operating system
------------------------------------------------------------
titan x86_64 Devuan Linux
Minor monster with 512G of ECC memory and triple NVidia Quadro
GPU units. Two of those are wide open unlocked killers that can
slam FP64 numerical data at crazy speeds.
A test of a full GCC 12.1.0 bootstrap took about 15 minutes and
that includes ada as well as a bunch of other options. This boxen
may end up being some backend build box for stuff. Or play DOOM2.
hostname architecture operating system
------------------------------------------------------------
mercury i686 FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p1
Every now and then you run into some slab of hardware that seems
to have no reason to keep on running .... but it does. Well. Here
we need to use the term "exceptional" as I don't know what else
works to describe this beast. Damn thing is a brick of steel and
capacitors from some historical period where quality mattered. Here
I mean the manufacturing is nothing less than flawless. Das ist
und
BEAST with no less than four SCSI controllers. The monster has
internal IDE and also PCI slots with an old EISA slot around also.
There is no such thing as on board graphics nor audio. There is no
such thing as built in ethernet. You get a speaker connected to some
motherboard pins and the thing can beep. Really loud. With FreeBSD
it can actually play music from that nasty large PC speaker.
It really is annoying but also cool. The storage is attached external
Sun Microsystems SCSI storage array as well as a single external Sun
Microsystems SCSI disk pack. The red Swingline stapler is there as a
cherry on top. Internally there is a HP 4mm DAT tape drive as well
as a floppy drive.
What about all that SCSI and ethernet that is needed? For that we
have the actual one thing on the motherboard. Internal Adaptec SCSI
controller for the internal disks that no longer exist. There is no
external SCSI port from the thing so that Adaptec chip is doing not
much. The external storage is provided via a PCI Adaptec AIC-7880U
as well as
two ( count them! ) Broadcom/LSI 53c875 SCSI boards that
also provide an ethernet port. Each has external SCSI and of course
the ethernet. Then, just for flavour, there is a PCI VIA Technologies
Rhine-II VT6102/VT6103 ethernet board. The graphical console is a
gift from another PCI card of the past : Matrox MGA G200 AGP. Yes
the graphics works just find on the Matrox board. So there is still
a slot free for the SoundBlaster Live! card. Somehow. As I say this
machine is a dual processor beast from the past with amazing Intel
Pentium II Deschutes modules. Yes these are great big modules and there are
two of them in there with an amazing 768MB of memory. Who could ask
for anything more!
All of the above ( except dream thor with the POWER9 ) are very real
and a whole collection of geeks use them. These are not QEMU or some other
virtual shazaam magic thing. The AWS Amazon people are specialists at
that trash. The real thing, is in fact, the real thing. You know it when
you see it. You also know it when you run it. Like a fine scotch, you
can not fake Macallan 15 or the 1824 series Macallan 25. Those who know
actually know. Recently I was introduced to Laphroaig and that has worked
out very well. Like drinking a camp fire of peat moss. Only it is smooth!
Also, the x86 hardware tends to fall over pretty badly if asked to do
things like an fmal(a,b,c) because x86 hardware simply can not implement
actual floating point datatypes from the IEEE754-2008 spec. All of the
POWER and SPARC equipment can, sort of. POWER9 really does.
see
schedule
