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Hi everybody, |
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|
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over twelve years ago, a mail with these headers was sent to alpha@gentoo org: |
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Subject: New dev box! |
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To: alpha@g.o |
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Date: Tue, 8 May 2007 20:49:10 +0200 |
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It announced the availability of Monolith, an ES40[0], soft-donated and hosted |
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by my then-employer. |
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Since the very early days, a lot of arch testing, and starting in 2008, all |
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release media building, was handled by this machine. At first, it had six 18GB |
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SCA drives, that later were upgraded 11x72G + 1x18GB (the root disk). None of |
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the disks ever developed a single bad sector, according to SMART. The oldest |
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disk was manufactured in 2001 and has been powered on for close to 150000 |
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hours. |
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The machine has been the most reliable piece of hardware I ever had the |
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pleasure to be the admin of, it never let us down, and has compiled more |
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software in its lifetime than most other machines I know of. |
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|
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But after twelve years of good service, Monolith will be turned off on |
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2019-09-01, and it will get to play in the server park upstate. |
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Naturally, there will be a backup of all the data that is still on the |
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machine, but once Monolith is turned off, it will likely not come back. Such |
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is life. |
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Ironically, Monolith has been an official part of Gentoo/Alpha for longer than |
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I have been a dev. But I am not going anywhere ;) |
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Q: I have an account on monolith, what about my data? |
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Any data you care about should be copied off the machine before 2019-09-01. |
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I will also make a full backup of the machine sometime in August. Some parts |
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(e.g. the (re)distributable binpkgs) I may put on a webserver somewhere for |
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future reference. |
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Q: What does this mean for Gentoo/Alpha? |
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|
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A: We lose our main build machine, as well as the testing ground for external |
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projects, like gcc. I hope we can find other hardware to keep Alpha alive, but |
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the future looks grim. The rest of the Alpha team and I will make a decision |
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regarding the future of Alpha in general. Matt Turner is working on a |
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replacement in the form of an ES47 (upgrade!), but the specifics are not clear |
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yet. |
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Q: Anything I can do to help? |
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Our donor may be willing to give away the machine basically for free, but it |
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probably will have to be picked up in Düsseldorf, Germany. If you plan on |
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doing so, with the aim to further support Gentoo/Alpha, I can put you in |
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contact. |
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Best, |
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Tobias, Alpha arch team lead. |
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[0] Here are the specs: |
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- 4x833MHz ev68AL CPUs. |
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- 8GB RAM |
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- Two 6x SCA drive bays on two 53c895 SCSI controllers |
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- an awesome LCD front panel: |
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http://skade.schwarzvogel.de/~klausman/images/monolith.jpg |
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