One good thing that has come out of our move was the inspiration to
upgrade our official workstations that Colin had originally put in place.
As I was selling off excess hardware anyway, I took it upon myself to
take some of the older official Skullspace workstations with me, with
the intent to replace them with new ones.
I brought in the first two new ones in last night, they are:
Skullspace #5, Intel Core 2, 2GB DDR2, 64bit
Skullspace #4, Intel Pentium IV HT, 2GB DDR2, 64bit
Both have
- Small desktop form factor cases, 40GB SATA hard drives, gigabit
networking, intel video
- 32bit Win XP SP3 (activated and set to actual product keys found on
the cases)
- 64bit Ubuntu 12.04 w/ Unity, LXDE, GNOME 3, XFCE, and KDE
- ipxe (http://ipxe.org) boot option for personal workstation service
so you can netboot your own personal OS (contact me to get this going)
(http://www.skullspace.ca/wiki/index.php/Personal_workstation_service)
Please don't tear them apart or wipe the drives. And do return monitors
if you feel compelled to borrow. (note there are other unused monitors
anyway).
I could use some more pretty labels with the above info.
With space at a premium, I think we should consider the optimal number
of official workstations to have -- both the number of "hot" ones that
are hooked up and ready to go, and the number of "cold" ones on storage
shelves ready to be quickly deployed if needed by a class, a thriving
hackathon, or J random group hacking spree.
In terms of the "hot" ones, I'm happy with what we have as of last night:
* 1 graphics workstation (which could still use someone to add a
retail copy of Windows on to, there is no OEM sticker)
* 2 regular workstations (#5 and #4)
* 1 Wyse Winterm RDP thinclient (very convenient for VM server access)
* 1 lounge computer (on loan from Dave, not really a "workstation",
its there for lounging)
And three "cold" ones on shelves should be good. I think we have
Skullspace #2 and Skullspace #3 sitting cold on the floor right now
(They should be on shelves). I'm going to replace them with two other
small form factor DDR2/PIV-HT desktop machines (and get rid of the old
ones) and bring another a replacement for another one that I took with
me (Skullspace #1).
Anyone have a different number of hot and colds units in mind? (I think
Colin expressed a preference for us returning to the original
configuration of 6 hot)
Second thought -- I think we need an explicit degree / rule that its not
acceptable to bring in your own personal workstation equipment for your
own personal use and to have it set up somewhere all the time. We can
not afford to allow every member to monopolize space -- it should be a
privilege only offered to those who pay an extra $60 per month (as some
have promised to do).
(Note, I'm talking about workstations here, servers properly installed
in the server area are a different story, though there's been talk of
having a fee to cover electrical use)
If someone wants to loan/donate really great equipment to be used as
official, shared, non-personal workstations, that's fine, just announce
it so that we can substitute out one the existing official workstations.
Folks can of course still play with their own equipment -- it just needs
to end up on storage when one is done with things, not on desks and not
on the floor. (Hopefully someone volunteers to organize a leasing
program for storage as well)
As of last night there were two unlabeled computers lying around outside
of the server area :
* one is a white tower on the floor
* the other is a small desktop unit with a missing cover and a badly
damaged back.
Neither of these are going to graduate to become official workstations
-- better ones are on the way. I think these should be nuked out of
orbit if they don't become labeled with the names of owners or on a
shelf with a name on them soon.
Mark
p.s. Come to the Dec 15 hackathon to help me write code to make the
personal workstation (netboot) service more super, I'd like to make it
so that "ask Mark" isn't a key setup step.
p.s. #2, to anyone who would like a skeleton level of official
workstations (such as 1 hot, 1 cold) with the idea in mind that
"everyone can bring a portable", I'd like to assert that not everyone:
* Can afford a decent portable of their own
* Enjoys working on such a thing compared to a proper desktop
* Has fun hauling one.
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