* We should probably look at putting Solaris 2.4 on ftoomsh.
* After which, I think we should we should introduce a few subtle security
holes and hold a ProgSoc hacker of the year competition. The first person
to crack root wins and gets a trophy (say, an old Qume dumb terminal)
and we fix any holes people used that we didn't know about.
* What to put in our equipment budget for 1995?
- SCSI disk.
Pro: More disk space.
Con: We probably have a few Gb of SMD disk in the truckload of
stuff we picked up from Sun.
- A PC server and put Linux on it.
Pro: fast (we could afford something about fast as a sparc 5),
better supported OS, in keeping with the spirit of
ProgSoc to play around with things.
Con: we spend all out money in one hit, can't put ftoomsh's
(large amounts of) memory and SMD disk in it.
Is ftoomsh is sufficiently fast at the moment?
- Some desktop PC systems.
Pro: We'd actually have something people could sit down and
use in the ProgSoc club room.
Con: They'd probably only get used to play games.
- Modems
Pro: Usable dial-up.
Con: There are already lots of cheap commercial service providers,
the telephone lines have expensive running costs (telephone rental
from ITD). There may also be no free data lines available at the
moment (?) and SoCS sounds like they will be upgrading their modem
support RSN.
* What to do with machines?
We have Ftoomsh, a medium-fast sun4 with 256Mb of memory, 2Gb of
newish SCSI disk and 1.6Gb of old SMD.
We also have Orgo, a slightly older, slower sun4 with 32Mb (?) of
memory and no disk.
In the gear we picked up from Sun, we probably have:
* SMD disk controller for Orgo, and maybe a SCSI controller as
well.
* An as yet unnamed sun 3 with 4 CPUs and an undetermined amount of
memory (which may or may not work) and a bunch of sun 3 cards.
* A large number of boxes which probably contain a large amount
of SMD disk (which may or may not work).
So, what do we do with all this?
- Keep going as we are?
Pro: Users mostly limited to quite UNIX-literate people, machines
don't become overloaded.
Con: Limited audience, we would interest more people ...
- Setup an additional general access, easy to use sort of machine
with mail, news, IRC, etc. Publicise it lots ...
Pro: Lots of people would want to use it, particularly if we put IRC
on it.
Con: Lots of people would want to use it. It'd take a moderate amount
of work to set it up. Is it really up to ProgSoc to be doing this
sort of thing?
- Use some of the other machines to setup an experimental OS, eg:
a plan 9 network or something similar.
Pro: interesting to play around with
Con: limited audience
Christopher.