Farms, Names, Pictures, Projects and Paper Trays

[S. Starbuck]

Some real nice stuff you've got there mitchellds!

A few updates for today.

Firstly, the company I ordered the last parts for have continued to mess around with my order, giving excuses, and so on. So today I simply told them to cancel it.

I've now re-ordered the stuff from elsewhere, which should, provided there are no more issues, arrive by the end of this week.

But I did get another packages today!

This one came all the way from Hong Kong:


And this is what it contained:


Not sure what they are? Here is one of them in place on the motherboard:


Yup, these are my IDE to Compact Flash adaptors. Now I just need the actual Compact Flash to arrive...

[S. Starbuck]

Well isn't this an interesting day...

PT1-Crunchy

PT2-RealTime

Yup.. Two nodes up and running!!!!!


Sadly not quite everything came today - The splitters to allow me to use one PSU on two motherboards are still not here - hence why it's just the two nodes, and not all four.

But lets see how we got to this stage, shall we?

Packages that came today:


Lets open the smaller package first:


And inside these:


In total there are 6 sticks of 1GB DDR2-1066 RAM. Although I can't make use of this speed with my current CPUs, it saves me having to upgrade the RAM later when I upgrade the CPUs.

So let's open the big parcel now!


Those PSUs are rated at 425W - More than enough to run two of those nodes.

Here is all the bits and bobs the PSUs came with:


Next, opening up (and popping much of) the bubble wrap, we find these:


The nice 2GB Compact Flash cards (rated at x133 speed.)

Popping those and the RAM into the motherboards:


So with them all wired up I could install the OS (Arch again). I have however moved them somewhere else... Here's a pic of me installing Arch:


As you can see, they are now in the bookshelf!

Here's a closer view:


And so there we have it. As soon as the extra cables come I'll get the other two online.

Now I am still looking for ideas for names. I decided having a simple numbering system would be a good idea, so they will all start with PTx (where X is the node number), but then each one gets a proper name as well.

So my thanks to Frederic Brillouet for the name Crunchy, vaughan for RealTime (not quite what you had in mind, but I liked it), and Danish Dynamite for the PTx idea.

As for projects, I'm liking AMDave's 10K idea, so I might go with that.

Anyhow, I'm rather happy at the moment