I am building a new "Clinic" machine, which we can use for dispensing distros and writing CDs and DVDs at the clinic.
I took one of my older machines, put in a newer AMD motherboard and SATA swap tray and PATA swap tray, and one DVD R/W drive. It has a USB3 card, and for now has a really old Matrox PCI video card. I'm now loading Scientific Linux 6.2 (Red Hat Enterprise 6.2 clone, 2.6.32 kernel) onto an old 120GB SATA drive. I will be testing the USB3 connection with a Seagate 3TB USB3 external drive ($140 at Costco). John can connect his portable USB drive (containing his distro collection) to it. If clinic clients bring in their PATA or SATA drives, we can use this machine to debug the software on them. Needs: 1) I could use a volunteer at the Clinic Sunday to configure the machine as a proper file server. http and ftp, feeding files from the external USB drive. Whatever it takes to serve RPM and DEB updates, perhaps stuff for Slackware and Gentoo if somebody wants that. This will only be used on the freegeek internal network, so ultra security would be nice but is not mandatory. 1a) If our heroic volunteer would rather do this for a different distro than SL6.2, set that up on a SATA drive and bring it in. We can easily swap boot drives. Note: it is slightly better to avoid LVM for this - put boot on /sda1 and root on /sda2, making boot order work off the drives installed, not partition names or LVM setup. 2) Vagrant and the network wizards will be in on Sunday. Could a volunteer help get this machine in the Free Geek name server and dhcpd tables? 3) If someone wants to donate another USB3 drive from Costco (or elsewhere) and start collecting distros, that would be spiffy. They are much faster than USB2 drives. If someone is willing to pay for one but isn't a Costco member, let me know and I'll buy one and you can reimburse me. The 2TB drives are $120. 3a) If someone can build some scripts on the external USB drive that go out and update from mirrors at night, that would be spiffy. Then someone with über-bandwidth can take the drive home between clinics, run the scripts, and download updates at night (I have 15mbps). 4) The machine is probably fast enough to write two DVDs at once, so filling the empty drive bay with a second R/W drive would double productivity. Any donations? 5) A better video card might be nice. There are a few unused PCI slots, and one unused PCIe-16 slot. I don't think we need the speed for normal operations, but if someone brings in their hard drive to work on a video app, it would be nice to have a broadly supported and faster video card, not a wonky old Matrox with VESA drivers. PCI preferred, because that leaves the PCIe slot open for other tests, but we takes what we gets. All this is a bit of work, but it will free us from dependence on John's laptop for writing distro CDs, and give us a network source of distros and upgrades which we can add to over the rest of the month. With the very fast dual USB3 connection, we can use more than one USB3 drive, and share the effort of collecting distros and updates. More updates during the day, as I bring up the machine. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
