Re: Audacity and Gentoo

On 2006-01-16, Nix <nix-razor-pit@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Oh, yes, but that light is *useful*; it tells me if the fans have
> failed. (There's also a software flag that gets raised, and the
> system sends me an email accordingly.)

You could try some small tabs of plastic on the fan blades, if the
buzzing sound stops, the fans are whacked.

Hmm, I'm full of useful suggestions today.

> Sheer because-it-was-theredom :)

One of the driving forces behind progress! Not to mention early death.

> Wow. That's a lot simpler than I thought. It may be simple enough even
> for me. I might try and see if I can make one sometime this year.

It is dead simple, if a lazy git like me can be bothered to do it,
then it has to be. It's been working without fault for probably about
4 years or so too.

> OK, you have worse radio reception than me :)

Can only get 4 channels with rotten reception unless I take the
Murdoch shilling, can only pick up radio 4 when using the TV aerial to
receive, to get anything better needs satellite dishes or expensive
external aerials. Still get to pay the full TV license though grumble
mumble.

> It does cope with that, but I haven't been running the daemon but just
> kicking up ntpdate every so frequently. The daemon locks itself in
> memory and things, and, well, I don't care about hyperaccurate clocks
> *that* much.

Tsk!

Just run NTP on one machine using a known NTP server (plenty about, I
use my ISP's server) and pool.ntp.org, then tell your other machines
to sync to that. It conditions the machine's clocks so that even if
they lose sync, they'll normally stay accurate for weeks.

> ... while I have four computers synching against each other, and
> two NTP sources on the net. I figure that if I drop off the net
> my machines really won't care if their time is out of synch with it
> because they're effectively out of causal contact.

I've got two internet NTP sources, which I regard as one source (as
they come over a medium that reduces accuracy), one radio clock
attached to the serial port of a machine (that's counted as another
source as it's not subject to net delays), then for extra checking I
have a wristwatch that syncs to a radio signal from Germany (a third
source, as it doesn't use the Rugby transmitter like the radio clock),
and finally an alarm clock by my bed that syncs to the Rugby
transmitter. If any of these agree with my wristwatch then I'm happy
to say that they're both accurate as it's not likely that they're all
syncing to a source that has the same error. I also have a
70-year-old clockwork wall-clock that I've tuned to only lose about 20
seconds a month but that's mostly for fun. Oh and my car radio syncs
to RDS (which is normally accurate on radio 4) and my palm pilot syncs
to my desktop machines.

I need to get out more.

> (But I had to synch *closely* when I was using Coda. If the time is more
> than a second out between replicated Coda servers, Coda throws a
> wobbly.)

A *second*! I freak if my machines disagree by more than about 50
milliseconds....

> Run the wires in conduit down the edges of the room, stick tower cases
> in the corners of rooms between desks and bookshelves and wardrobes, and
> abhor desktops.

I used to do similar, but it's a PITA when you need to extract a
machine for furtling. With the rack, I can remove the plugs from the
back and slide the machine out the front, then just slide it back in
afterwards and cable it up. All the wiring is cable-tied into the
rack. Racks exist for a reason ;-) You can get them for about £100 on
ebay. Previously I'd have machines on their sides under desks with
the rears facing outwards to aid in re-wiring but it never was quite
as convenient.

Now they're all piled up in a 6-foot cabinet. The rack itself has
just 6 cables running to it, one network cable for downstairs, one
ADSL cable, 2 power cables (one for UPS, one for non-UPS), one network
cable for the desktop and build area, and one long KVM cable to attach
to the monitor/keyboard/mouse ports of machines I'm building.

It might seem a bit extreme for a home network, especially when you
consider that I have another two racks awaiting use (one will be set
up in the next few weeks), but I work almost exclusively from home,
that's my excuse!

> It seems to work; the only wire I normally see is a 20cm
> length of network cable in my bedroom that I haven't bothered to wrap in
> conduit yet. (Oh, and the places where the conduit stops and the cable
> wriggles through holes in walls and that sort of thing.)

Hey even *I* don't have computers in my bedroom ;-) Mind you given
that I work from home, I can justify giving a room over to an office,
in fact it's pretty much a requirement to stop meself going loco!

> I'll have to see if there's a Linux port of that :) I haven't played it
> since, oh, the early 90s? The late 80s? Something like that.

I played R-Type for about an hour today and got further than I've ever
got before, what joy ;-) Robotron is manic, I won't play that tonight
as I've had a gin and tonic, ruins the concentration. A belt of
coffee tomorrow then off to save humanity again.

As for a linux port, just install xmame, you can either grab the 15
gig or so of ROMs via bit-torrent or just ask me for specific ones.
There's no point in playing a port when you can play what the game
thinks is the real thing.

It has to be said though, playing R-Type, pac-man etc on a normal
computer is pants, put playing it on a stand-up cabinet is just so
different it's amazing.

> (It's amazing how expensive distributed simulation can be. You have
> a choice between slow-as-a-dog conservative synchronization
> algorithms or faster-but-impossible-to-predict-runtime
> optimistic/predictive ones...)

Indeed, a friend of mine is a Doctor in Distributed Virtual Reality,
the complexities of throwing a ball to someone on the other side of
the world in a scalable (up to thousands of users) manner is quite
incredible. He has to write reams and reams of Z notation to figure
it all out properly.

> Interesting. I'll have a look around when I build my next machine and
> see if I can find some.

Heat pipes are quite common-ish in the overclocker's world, so I don't
think they're very expensive, certainly not exotica any more.

> The expirer does that, and it's not simple. However I did find a bug in
> the design yesterday that would have accidentally expired files
> corresponding to currently-visible inodes, and another bug today that
> would have led to:
>
> bar

All roads lead to "bar".

Distributed *anything* is a PITA frankly...

> Hey, I could use lzo...

lzip was more efficient, it used lossy compression on common data, and
you could tune it down to the accuracy you required, even to the point
of ending up with compressing megabytes down to single bits. Needless
to say it was a spoof although UNIX implementations were produced.

> They seem to actually want to store *data* and then *retrieve* it
> again. But then despite this they go and use Oracle. This contradiction
> is incomprehensible to me.)

Blimey, you're going to flip your lid if you're not careful. Mixing
databases with filing systems is a recipe for madness.

> There is documentation in the download regarding what's *actually
> there*. Note that like GFS it's designed with SANs and iSCSI and the
> like in mind, and like GFS it doesn't *need* them and works perfectly
> well on a reasonably speedy Ethernet network.

Do you know if you can dynamically resize the Lustre filesystem
*downwards* as well as upwards? What I'd like to be able to do is to
create a "scratch" filesystem that uses spare space on other discs on
my network, but I'd need to be able to conveniently (and perhaps
scriptably) reduce the amount of space used by Lustre on occasion,
depending on the needs of individual machines.

--
Blast off and strike the evil Bydo empire!
.

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