| Greg's computer systems |
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This page was written in early 2002, and it reflects the status then. The main hardware page is more up to date.
The photo shows me in my office in Echunga in front of four computers and an X terminal. It was taken in February 2002 in the new office in the house extension we built in 1999. Previously I had most of this hardware in a tiny little office in the existing part of the house. I also have an older version of this page showing what things looked like in October 2000.
There are a number of machines in this picture:
By my knees is echunga.lemis.com, a 750 MHz AMD Athlon with 256 MB memory, running FreeBSD 4-STABLE. The motherboard is an Epox 7KXA. Previously this machine used to be wantadilla.lemis.com. It's my main gateway to the Internet.
Behind the third and fourth monitors from the left, you can barely see a corner of wantadilla.lemis.com, an AMD Athlon XP 1700+ with 512 MB RAM running at 1466 MHz. This is my main work machine. It includes two tape drives, a Quantum DLT 4000 and an AIWA GD-8000 DDS-2. I had an Exabyte 8500XL, but it died on me and has not (yet) been repaired.
Underneath the left-most monitor is flame.lemis.com, a SPARCStation 5 running OpenBSD 2.5. It's part of the Samba build farm.
Underneath the next monitor to the right are iskra.lemis.com, a SPARCStation 2 which sometimes runs SunOS 4.1.3_U2 or Solaris 2.2, but which is mostly just a prop for the monitor, and a Cisco 2900XL switch.
x-rated.lemis.com, a Labtam X terminal, is under the middle monitor. The box is the same size as the SPARCStations, so it props up the monitor. It is also almost always turned off.
As you can see, I currently have five monitors on my desks. They are connected to echunga and wantadilla, and they run XFree86 4.1.0, connected by x2x. From left to right, we have:
A Matrox G200 on wantadilla:0.1, running at 1920x1440x24. Horizontal sync is 105 kHz, vertical refresh 71 Hz. The monitor is a Hitachi SuperScan 813.
A Matrox Millennium on wantadilla:0.0, running at 1600x1200x16. The two Millennium cards are not the same, and that this one had a maximum dot clock of 220 MHz, not 175 MHz like the other one, so I can run this one at 106 kHz horizontal and 85 Hz vertical. The monitor is another Hitachi 813.
A Matrox G400 on echunga:0.1, running at 2048x1536x24. Horizontal sync is 114 kHz, vertical refresh 73 Hz. The monitor is an IBM P260.
Another Matrox Millennium on echunga:0.2, running at 1600x1200x8. Due to the slow dot clock (175 MHz), the horizontal sync is 84 kHz, and the frame refresh is only 67 Hz. The monitor is an iiyama VisionMaster 21. I used to quite like this monitor, but it's getting old now, and the Hitachi and IBM monitors both leave it behind.
An old ATI Mach64 on wantadilla:0.0 running at 1280x1024x8. Even so, the vertical refresh is only 74 Hz, and the horizontal frequency is 79.5 Hz. The monitor is an iiyama VisionMaster Pro 21, with a trinitron tube which is much worse in resolution, contrast and convergence than the conventional tube in the other iiyama. That's why it's on the low-resolution display.
As before, they are joined together with x2x. I have now well passed the 10 megapixel mark with 11061248 pixels. Here are the X configurations for wantadilla and echunga.
I hate “desktops”, if by that you mean lots of eye candy, unintelligible pictures and wasted space. I can read, and I prefer to do so. As a result, though I've played with things like GNOME and KDE (listed in alphabetical order, in case you're wondering), I stick to fvwm2. On occasion I've been asked about my configuration, so here's the current configuration. It's really the live configuration, so it will reflect things that I don't mention here.
The keyboard is a Northgate OmniKey/Plus. It was the best keyboard I ever had, but after 8 years of constant pounding it wore out. I briefly replaced it with an Avant Stellar, but wasn't quite the same, and it had some issues with the CapsLock key turning on by itself which made it very difficult to use with x2x, so I had to go back to the OmniKey. I've since found two ``new'' OmniKey Plus keyboards, so things aren't quite as bad, but I suppose I'll need further replacements unless some company starts building well laid-out keyboards again. If you know where I can get a new OmniKey/Plus, please contact me.
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In the Mike Smith Memorial Room I have a test setup with a number of further machines. Their configuration changes constantly; what you see is the configuration on 2 February 2002. From left to right:
On the extreme left are two hot pluggable disk enclosures out of my Sun disk array. I use them for testing file system and volume manager software.
Next is sydney.lemis.com, a Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop with a 1400x1050 display, the only reason why I bought it. It runs the FreeBSD SMPng development kernel which I helped develop. I use it for kernel debugging and copying photos. Note the PCMCIA flash card adaptor and the wireless Ethernet.
Behind sydney is kimchi.lemis.com, an AMD K6/233 running NetBSD. It's part of the Samba build farm.
To the right of sydney is pizza.lemis.com. It's running Linux 2.4.12, and I'm developing a read-only version of IBM's JFS1 file system on it.
Behind pizza you can see two UPSs which handle most of the machines.
To the right of pizza are the only keyboard (another Northgate OmniKey/Plus; I had a total of three of them) and an IBM G96 monitor. They connect to the machines via a 6-way Belkin KVM switch which you can barely see to the right of the monitor. There's also a 5-way Netgear FS-105 switch on top of the KVM switch.
Behind the monitor is sphinx.lemis.com, a dual processor IBM pSeries (formerly called RS/6000) running Linux. I'm planning to implement the JFS1 support on it, and also port FreeBSD if I ever get time.
To the right of the keyboard is zaphod.lemis.com, a dual processor Celeron 466 machine which I used to develop the FreeBSD SMPng implementation. It runs FreeBSD 5-CURRENT, and it's also part of the Samba build farm.
To the right of zaphod is another Celeron 466, this time a single processor, current.lemis.com. I use it for general FreeBSD development. At the moment it's running 5-CURRENT, as the name suggests. When I put something else on it, the name will also change.
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I'm running two wireless networks, an 802.11b DSSS network in ad-hoc mode, and an 802.11 FHSS network (2 Mb/s). Both are controlled from air-gw.lemis.com, a 486/DX-2 with 16 MB, running at 66 Mhz. It's strategically placed in a cupboard the middle of the house. It runs FreeBSD.
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My Internet downlink is via satellite, controlled froom sat-gw.lemis.com, a 133 MHz Pentium with 16 MB RAM. It's in the HiFi cupboard I built last winter. It runs Linux, because the drivers supplied for the receiver card are in binary-only form.
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