Re: Audacity and Gentoo

On Sat, 14 Jan 2006, Ian Rawlings murmured woefully:
> On 2006-01-14, Nix <nix-razor-pit@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> 1U -> good cooling, but alas
>> 1U -> noisy
>>
>> (small fan syndrome...)
>
> Small *fast* fan syndrome, two small fans running much slower wouldn't
> make anywhere near as much noise so I'll probably replace the small
> fan with either another one with a heat-sensitive controller, or
> a larger number of slower fans.

Yeah, but the smaller the fan the faster it has to spin to move a given
amount of air :/ I don't know how overspecified most machines are when
it comes to cooling, but I *do* know that in the summer months, I've had
cooling problems with machines here. (No air-conditioning in this
house.)

> When I build some 1U servers I'll use mini-itx boards to minimise the
> cooling requirements, sommat like a 600MHz or so would do fine.

Agreed. CPU power for the sake of it is, well, silly, unless you really
like giving the power company money.

> hard discs would need more cooling than the motherboard but ISTR that

Really? My disks downstairs run at ~45C even with 1U fans, and one of my
older ones upstairs stabilises at 62C if you don't shove air over it
(although with enough air it's cooler than the downstairs disks).

> you can tune newer drives to make less racket and a side effect of it
> is that they heat up less

Yeah. They slow down a bit, but that's rarely noticeable unless you're
doing massive swapping or a backup or something, and you can turn on
high-acoustic mode before you do that.

>> I've heard of people doing things like that. How hard is it to set up,
>> anyway?
>
> Making a MAME cab is easy, I bought a scruffy cabinet for £50 on ebay,
> which came with two joysticks, 5 buttons for each player two player
> start buttons, the monitor, power supplies and all the wiring. From
> there you have a number of options, you can get a JAMMA converter
> which plugs directly into the circuitry of JAMMA-standard cabinets and

See, I'd never even heard the term `JAMMA' before... now, thanks to
the JAMMA FAQ and Google, I know. I had no idea these things were
standardised to that degree.

> I bought a controller board called an I-PAC that has lots of screw
> terminals along one edge, and two keyboard connectors on the other.
> You connect the labelled terminals to the joystick microswitches, plug
> a supplied keyboard lead into the computer and into the IPAC, and a
> normal keyboard into the other port on the IPAC. Waggling the

!!

> joysticks then simulates keypresses that correspond to the default
> MAME keys. I replaced most of the microswitches though.

That's... disturbing. A board built with MAME in mind?

> Then I ripped the old TV-resolution monitor out of the cabinet (I hate
> old monitors, they're dodgy)

.... and hot and wavering and smell of burning insulation.

> There are now a wide variety of USB control panels you can buy with
> things like trackballs and analogue joysticks on, I'll get around to

(although some arcade games had such peculiar controls that you can't
really put them in a standard cabinet that you want to use for anything
else as well...)

> Then it's just a case of tuning the software. Old versions of MAME
> are best, they run fewer games but run them much quicker due to the
> delicate line the MAME devs tread to avoid being sued. If you want

*boggle* the *speed* has reduced? What on earth? Is this some sort of
elaborate patent-evasion thing or something?

> more info, pop over to alt.games.mame but check the FAQ first and
> don't under any circumstances mention 3D accelerator cards!

(Some simple googles in that group don't reveal anything. about this
weirdness. And I'm happy with my Radeon 9250. :) )

>> I suppose arcade games don't really need high-quality displays :)
>
> This is for my PVR box, 800x600, I can easily run a 132x41 character
> xterm on it and post to news and read email, which is exactly what I'm
> doing right now, sitting about 10 feet away from the screen.

OK, you have a *lot* more odd hardware than I have. :)

>> Yeah. I'm pushing my noisiest box into the loft soon: I've had enough
>> of the Netra's jet-engine whine.
>
> Be careful that doesn't make it worse! If it's mounted on boards, you
> can get a rumbling in the room below that's even more annoying, and

We're thinking of putting it on polystyrene blocks and seeing what that
does.

> the noise from the fans travels through the loft and into the rooms
> below as there's no walls to dampen it so the noise is similar in
> every room.

We also have a foam-lined wooden box with holes at the front and back
and top (given the pretentious name `acoustic cabinet') which seem to
keep the sound down a good bit.

>> I'd really like cooling with no moving parts, but everything I've found
>> that works that way either involves massive banks of Peltier arrays (and
>> then you have to get all the heat away from *them*, which means more
>> fans), or liquid cooling, generally with *water*, which strikes me as
>> utterly bloody stupid unless you really want electrical fires, short
>> circuits, an algae farm and low reliability.
>
> It's not really a problem if you don't need fast CPUs, although a
> passive-cooled machine inside a rack would probably best have a slow
> fan due to the reduced air flow.

Passive-cooled -> <400MHz, and probably <200Mhz, as even my P233 got a
case hot enough to scorch when the fans failed. The last machine I owned
that I could truly run fanless was esperi, my 486.

I guess an ARM or something is probably the thing to go for. :)

>> Lustre is what some of the Coda hackers wrote after they wrote
>> Intermezzo (and then stalled that, annoying, it looked nice but never
>> really went anywhere).
>
> Intermezzo rings a bell, I suspect that's what I was looking at
> instead of Coda, I'll just wait until they make their minds up ;-)

They Intermezzo people are all working on Lustre now, which *rocks*, but
doesn't quite serve the same goals as Intermezzo did (as in, it's meant
for big, big, *big* distributed filesystems, how many petabytes do you
want with that?)

--
`I must caution that dipping fingers into molten lead
presents several serious dangers.' --- Jearl Walker
.

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