Bryan Tong Minh schrieb: Yes, home is currently on hemlock. Hemlock, vandale and zedler will be idle when the new systems have been integrated fully. We have not yet decided on what to do with them. Some may be decommissioned (so save power and make room for new servers), lent to OSM, dedicated to some special/stable tools, or we may keep them as alternative login servers. Willow will then also be free for use as a second login server. We will look into tools for workload management / grid computing tools to make the most of having multiple login servers. Stable will move to a virtual box/zone on the new server that will also host the /home directory. It's currently causing next to no load, so virtualizing it seems the right thing. -- daniel

Simon Walker schrieb: This has not been decided yet. We might let it run solaris, or change it to linux or freebsd. Having the option to use different OSes is nice, but having to maintain multiple OSes takes effort. -- daniel

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Marcin Cieslak: yes; the only reason we don't is that most of our users only have experience with Linux, and find the Solaris userland unfamiliar (this was evident when we only had one server, which ran Solaris). we thought that using Linux on the login servers, while adding complexity for us, would reduce the amount of user support we had to do. unfortunately the original plan - which was that i would continue to maintain the Solaris side of the infrastructure and someone else would be responsible for the user servers running Linux - did not work out very well, and a lot of my time is taken up fixing problems on the Linux side. so, we're currently testing FreeBSD on vandale to see how it compares to Linux; if we did decide to move, all the Linux servers would be changed to FreeBSD, leaving only two operating systems, like we have at the moment. if we don't move, we won't be left with three operating system, we'll simply stop testing on vandale. the exception, which Daniel is referring to, is that during the migration, we would install one server (willow) with the new OS, and encourage people to use that, while retaining the existing Linux server for a while. this allows us to do more real world testing (not many people are actually using the test server), and also gives people time to migrate to the new OS. after that's complete, we would reinstall the Linux systems with the new OS. other than FreeBSD, we're also considering standardising on Solaris for user servers, which would leave us with a single OS. we might also decide not to change anything. but none of this has been decided yet, more testing is needed before we can make a firm decision. - river

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Aryeh Gregor: because many of the things Linux users are familiar with (particular commands, arguments, etc) are also present in FreeBSD, but not in Solaris. (usually there's another way to do the same thing, but it requires a reasonable understanding of the system to find it; many of our users are at the stage where they know a lot of interesting commands, but don't have a very strong overall knowledge of Unix.) - river.

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 10:47 AM, James Hare <messedrocker(a)gmail.com> wrote: River thinks the same about Solaris. The point is that most toolserver users probably don't -- they're used to Linux.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Is the commons database going to still be shared between s1 and s3? That may be a good use for one of those leftover servers... X! On May 17, 2009, at 7:00 AM [May 17, 2009 ], Daniel Kinzler wrote: