[Hosting] free alpha box

[Christian J Hedemark]

Kevin said:
> Disk is not an issue - space to put the disks *IN* has been.

Meaning a host box?  If you don't mind x86 I don't think there would be a
problem scrounging hardware.  For example, are those SCSI disks compatible
with an Adaptec AHA-2940W?  If so I may be able to chip in there.  If they
are LVD forget it I can't help.  Ideally it would be nice to cram it all in
a 1U or 2U box so we don't use up our half rack too quickly (I know half a
rack seems like a lot but it fills up fast!)

I would not rule out the idea of some sort of fundraising event to try and
drum up $3,000 or $4,000 for a disk server.   I think POGO Linux has
something in a 1U that has like almost a quarter TB of storage (raw) in a 1U
form factor, using 3Ware IDE RAID, for under $3,000.

> We may ahve to schedule soem fatalpha downtime to re-organize. If we
> move the mirror disks and the home dirs to a private network dedicated
> box that could be mounted on *ANY* machine, I'd be truely happy. Add
> kerberos into the mix, and we can just add people once, and not have
> to wrry about which machine they log into.

Yes, this would be very nice indeed.

> I looked it over this morning. Since it has no number on it, I'm
> assuming it's a RaQ 1, and unless DEC made x86 processors, MIPS.
>
> I suppose I could attempt to bootstrap the harddrive similar to how
> they do it with debian HURD - partition & format on an x86 machine,
> copy over a MIPS base system, and hope for the best when I boot it.
>
> Not that any of it matters until we have the go-ahead to actually use
> the box, mind you...

Eh.  Might be useful to package MIPS binaries up but not much else I think
(the RAQ 1 systems were slooooow).  BTW I searched and searched for doc on
reloading the OS on RAQ boxen and the closest thing I could find was other
RAQ owners scoffing at those who wanted to do this, horrified that anyone
would want to molest their precious little toaster.  I think we'll be on our
own here, and if any of us figures it out we owe it to the community to
document the process.