[Hosting] PPC and Alpha are cool, but....

[Kevin - The Alchemist - Sonney]

On Fri, Nov 16, 2001 at 08:29:04AM +0500, Tom Bryan spoke thusly:
> I'm somewhat confused.  Do we need to share shell accounts across the boxes?  
> I thought that the "build farm" was a set of machines where I just submitted 
> some type of job to run on each box.  That is, I thought the build farm was 
> really for unattended builds.  Is that not true?  (All of the projects I'm 
> working with at SourceForge are in Perl or Python...so I've never looked into 
> the compile farm.)

The trick here is that if we submit a job to each machine, they all
need the disk space to ahndle all the builds. We can cheat, a little,
if we mount a shared drive array and run it all on that. Plus, if
we're running out of space, we can just add space to the mounted
drive, and get it for all the systems. We could do this with a cross
compiler setup, but that means that the single system running the
compelations would need some serious CPU space.

> I use SF, and I almost never use my shell account.  I'm not really sure why 
> it's needed except for setting up web pages.  Are their other uses? 

Let's see - email, news, web browsing, debugging code realtime. 

If we do it right, you can log in to any one of the boxes, and have
the same setup on them all. if you custom compile a binary, though,
you have to make sure it's on all arches, though.

(I do something like this at home - the i386 and alpha boxes all use
the same /home & common data dirs. Just the binarys differ. Shell
scripts behave the same on both platforms...)

-- 
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--      Kevin "The Alchemist" Sonney      --
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"If you'll read the subtext for many of those old strips, you'll find
the heart of an old-fashioned Libertarian. And I'd be a Libertarian,
if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners."
  -- Berkley Breathed, 2001