[Dxspider-support] Cluster on Old Laptop - mantra for CVS

[Mike Lewis]

Hi,
 
wanted to pass on some experiences, and then ask a tired old question
that has been asked many times before, that I can never quite remember.
 
I just finished porting my cluster from it's desktop box (a 550 MHz
Celeron Box, 256 MB, 9GB SCSI drive, Red Hat 9, ax25 support to a
PK232), to an even older laptop. My reasons for this were
 
- laptop has a smaller footprint, takes up less shack space, and is
quieter (No fan noise)
- For the fun of it, to see if I could make it work
 
The laptop is an older IBM, 755CD, which is a 100MHz 486 with an 810MB
HD and only 16MB of RAM. I ended up picking Debian, and I must say, it
was a good choice. Unlike my previous installs on Red Hat and Mandrake,
where I ended up re-compiling the kernel to get the ax25 support, the
Debian allowed me to configure all of the ax25 support as modules
painlessly at install time (including the required utilities). Made this
all very easy. Had to install from floppies, as the IBM has a swappable
CD ROM drive that is not bootable. This was not too bad, after getting
around a bad image on one of the driver floppies on the original site I
downloaded from. The Debian package manager front end, dselect, was good
to use, although it is VERY slow to load package lists and to install
selected packages (function of my slow CPU and miniscule amount of RAM I
expect). My PCMCIA Ethernet I/F came up no problems, and with a non-X
Windows install I have a whopping 150MB left after everything is in,
which seems small by today's standards, but should be just fine for a
dedicated cluster box like this is. Cluster is now back up and it seems
to be running smooth, and I have a surplus 550MHZ box to store or sell.
I would heartily recommend Debian to anyone looking to bring Spider up
(or any other cluster or ham software for that matter) - it was easier
than either of the other 2 distros for me. Best of all, an old laptop
that was headed towards oblivion is now back with useful work to do, and
I have a quieter shack and more shelf space to clutter up with some
other radio-related toys!
 
 
My question is - I forget what the initial steps are to get setup to be
able to use CVS to perform updates to the current build. Seems like I
saw the instructions on the website before, but I guess I am
sleep-deprived (not much doubt about that!) - I can't seem to find it
now. Anyone want to give me a gentle reminder on where to look or what
to do? I confess to being a self-taught Linux hacker whose knowledge is
pretty spotty at best...
 
73 de KE0MF/MIke (Node KE0MF-15 sysop)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.tobit.co.uk/pipermail/dxspider-support/attachments/20040401/0911c4e9/attachment.html