[plug] TwinSpark

[Matt Kemner]

Hi all

My apologies for Spark being offline for so long Today.

It crashed again sometime during the night, and when I came in this
morning I opted to finish setting up it's replacement, rather than
gaffer-tape the old one back into working.

The new machine was kindly donated by Leon Brooks, and has roughly 4 times
the processing power and 10 times the RAM of the old one, so hopefully it
will be the end of the constant problems we were having.

The new machine is an Axil 320.

Axil was a company that made clones of the Sun Sparc series.
The 320 has 2 Ross HyperSparc CPUs, each of which is roughly twice as fast
as the MicroSparc found in the old Sparc Classic - hence 4 times the
processing power.

This 320 also came with 320MB of RAM - as opposed to the 32 the old
classic had.

It also appears to be a rock-solid system - On Friday night before I went
home I ran:

cd /usr/src/linux
while true
do
  make -j4 vmlinux
done

and when I came in Monday morning it was still happily compiling away,
with no record of segfaults, kernel OOPSen, etc, which the old one was
infamous for.

It is running Woody on kernel 2.4.1 which took 52mins to compile on a
single CPU (default Debian install kernel is not SMP) and with both CPUs
firing, using make -j4 it takes about 30m to compile the same kernel.

The 320 came with built in SCSI and 10Mb ethernet (like most sparcs) and
this one had an additional SCSI card, and additional 10/100Mb ethernet
card installed. I'm using the 10/100 to connect to the world (via a 10/100
switch)

Incidentally, the 10/100Mb card is called a BigMac, and it gave me this
error message recently: 

bigmac_is_medium_rare: QEC_BMAC_ERROR,  RESET

*grin*

Anyway, It should have all the same packages installed that the old spark
did (thanks to dpkg --get-selections / --set-selections) and I have copied
the config files across for smartlist/apache/postfix.

I'm not sure if there's anything else that I've missed, so if you notice a
problem, please let me know and I will fix it.  Also, you may have noticed
a handful of plug messages bounce back, because I had forgotten to run
newaliases after copying /etc/aliases across (Doh!)

I hope this new machine will work out much better for us all.

Many, many thanks to Leon for the kind donation.

 - Matt