The collected works of skywriter - Page 14

uunix wrote:

skywriter wrote: Binge-watching BSG reboot (who in their right mind could watch the 1st one?) for the 4th time. I discovered this gem late in life.

What? What? New Battle Star? Where? How? When? How do I get this?

What? You're kidding. It's the 2004-2009 one.

@vishnu I bought the DVD version too. But now that it's back up on HULU - I watch it there; more convenient.

I watched Caprica; not a great show - didn't seem to go anywhere worth following. You definitely had to watch every episode - in order - of BSG; It's not like it was Gilligans Island after all.

Interrupting cow!!! architecture!

"An error occurred" - thank god...

Going off-chip will kill you everytime.

R-ten-K wrote: I imagine there is a forum, somewhere else, where physicists and mathematicians put up equations written by software "engineers" to laugh out loud at them.

LOL! Ain't it the truth :-)

I have 6 sets. Saving them for a project someday!

Joe, that guy in the video - while misrepresenting a lot of stuff, such as one model replacing another is wrong; they were meant as alternatives, and all were sold concurrent with other models of iPhone, and iPad - is just plain annoying with all the pauses in speaking.

So far, I still use my iPad Mini w/ Bluetooth folding portfolio case most of the time. When I do use the iPad Pro I don't use the Pen; I don't draw much if at all, or the keyboard; would rather use the iPad Mini. What is does come in handy for is watching videos - love those speakers(!), with the nice big screen, or lots and lots of Synthesis and Music oriented apps in my studio; DAW's, compressors, effects, app remotes, etc... where lots of touch screen space is always appreciated.

Many years ago I ditched everything except Apple for all my computer networking needs - mostly, except for Networks - not counting Apple WIFI Access points- and Network Storage; I have a NETGEAR ReadyNAS 6GB RAID6 array, a Direct attached Drobo 5 disc RAID5 E-STAT Array for Final Cut projects, and Mac Pro fronted Drobo 8 disc RAID6 iSCSI array. Also a NETGEAR 24 port 1gb switch, and a NETGEAR router/firewall.

Hey fu! Yeah, that zyxel is still sitting on the shelf. I decided to just get a better NETGEAR than the model I had. I went through two of them that eventually would randomly hang the gateway to my cable connection that everyone here. I ended up with the NETGEAR FVS318v3; a nice step up from the FVS318g :-) no problems at all with the v3! NETGEAR is the one other vendor that has done fairly well in this house, and it's the only other company I will consider other than Apple. Printers are a crap shoot though I go with HP - the devil I know.

I usually stick with a laser printer w/duplexor for and an 'all-in-one' with/duplexer - the latter is most useful for kids that want 'color prints', and scanning tax documents , and run approximately three 'all-in-ones' per laser printer.

The pen is only as good as the app that supports it. I have these app that seem to support most than the 'dumb finger' pen model: Adobe Sketch, Paper, Procreate, ArtStudio, and Pixelmator. Goofing with these & Apple pen might give you a better idea than me giving it a random skribble. :-)

fu wrote:

pentium wrote: Developing film in my bathroom.

kids to the rescue!

LOL! Or is it?????

ClassicHasClass wrote: Working on [snip] Linux. [snap]

That's pointless enough right there! :-)

surrealdeal wrote:

skywriter wrote:

ClassicHasClass wrote: Working on [snip] Linux. [snap]

That's pointless enough right there! :-)

Do you ever get that creeping feeling that dealing with source-code is one of those zen things, like raking a garden of sand, designed to distract a person from the fact that their life is empty and that they are poverty ridden?

YES! It was the singularly most horrible experience I had before I retired. Looking through and trying to improve code that was so bananas and nobody would let you make a change because they didn't know what the effect would be - even though I already determined what the effect was, and it was the right thing to do. Hardware engineering was so much more mature. I don't believe that there is an engineering discipline to software that is practiced anywhere but in textbooks and academia. Elsewhere I would just call it 'coding', which is merely a small step above typing.

The only thing I find scary about AI, is that given the opportunity to re-write itself we would actually finally see how programming should be done.

Which raises the question: can you even have 'real' AI without the ability to self-modify it's own code? If so, our protection architectures are severely broken platforms to develop AI upon. We need something as broken and half-assed as our own childhood to make it all work :-)

When I think of my SkyWriter, I think "THIS is SGI, and THIS is the box I will go out in", when I have it converted into a coffin.

BLAiSE wrote: Hi all!

Not a recent work (I graduated in 2009), but I used my SGI Visual Workstation 320 to create my graduation film at the university.
Parental advisory explicit content! :D

Hilarious! Thank you!!!

Hey '452, why did you quote me? The only thing I see connecting my content with your content is we both I ironically quoted the word 'real'.

yeah, I figured something was disconnected.

Anyone using this? I just finished tussling with weird behavior on my old Leopard G5 Server and DroboPro iSCSI array. Figured, this would be a low cost way to replace the G5 with an Intel 2.66Ghz dual core XEON running (GASP!) modern softwares!!

Sounds perfect! I have a houseful of nothing but Apple computes, so it should work great - also a 20kw generator so UPS isn't strictly a problem :-)

The feature set for OSX Server looks ideal for me, especially the caching.

Anyone use Xsan4 over Ethernet? Don't I need a client? Never heard of StorNext...

Xsan is a powerful and scalable solution for storage consolidation. Everyone in your organization can have fast, concurrent access to terabytes of centralized data. Built into OS X, Xsan allows any Mac to access Xsan or StorNext volumes over Fibre Channel or Ethernet.

smj wrote: Just to be clear: Sky are you asking about the "OS X Server" add-on available for $19.99 through the App Store? Currently v5.1, which requires OS X 10.11.4?

They stopped offering the non-add-on version quite a few years ago now, right?

That's what the title says :-) more or less. I have 10.5 server, I figured out the problem with TimeMachine, or I should say TimeMachine figured it out; it burbled something about reliability and rewrote the backup. Something I had done several times. TM server just up and stops running my iMac every so often - I have to reboot Server and the Drobo subsystem to get it going again. Time to upgrade to something different. I bought an old Intel Mac Pro, another Drobo Pro, and Apple server (App Store) to run TM backups on. I'll keep the G5 Leopard server around, it runs well with Quad Core G5 running Final Cut Pro. They both have a ton of memory in them too. I have to get more for the most recent Mac Pro, it only had 2GB in it.

Still working on getting the parts for a Mac Server 5.1 setup. Meanwhile reading the Manual yields this out-of-touch paragraph:

Supported operating systems
Computers with OS X Yosemite can be used as Xsan 4.0 metadata controllers and clients.
Computers with OS X El Capitan can be used as Xsan 4.1 metadata controllers and clients.
To join an Xsan 4.0 or 4.1 SAN, Windows, AIX, IRIX, Linux , and Solaris clients must be running Quantum’s StorNext File System.

Irix? Really? Are we really serious, or did we forget to update some text from the 90's.

@robespierre, well that's no fun. :-)

Hmm, actually I ended up with 4 DroboPro's (32 drive slots). They're not sceaming fast, but ease of use (self managed Raid 5/6) for online-backup, or Media storage for iTunes and DVD's, or just moderate performance Fileservering; I haven't seen anything close it. I have enough slots for 64TB.

Maybe I could write a I/O striping shim to strip the Drobo's, that would be more than enough to saturate a 1GB wire. I'm using one Ethernet port for the Network, and the other as an iSCSI link to the 4 Drobo's Ethernet ports through a switch. Unfortunately, any management has to go to all Drobo's, so you're have to know which transfer are management and which are I/O. Worse yet, there is some finagling between the host management software format, and the Drobo's internal noodling at the block level (or somekind of block representation) that inexplicably prevents the user from formatting it any other way - in fact you CAN'T format it - it HAS to be formatted with their management software. Weird.

I don't suppose you can do static trunking or link aggregation (LAG) on 2 ports of the Mac Pro and the switch? Then I could put the Drobo's on FireWire ports, and use LAG to allow for more network bandwidth to flow through 4 FW800 ports.

Oh and yeah! I got a 2nd ReadyNAS Pro 6. These things are KICK ASS fast! But difficult to find on Ebay - nobody gets rid of them. Especially the Pro 6 Business Edition which supports iSCSI - which is the first one I bought. I've clocked the iSCSI from this baby (which BTW connects to my Netgear GS724T/24 port Gigabit switch which uses LAG) going at 109MB/Sec, nice!

Any of youz guyz ever use sync with OS X? I would like to backup the ReadyNAS 6's with sync to some of the Drobo devices.

Sorry, it dropped the r in sync. Thanks!

Thank for the info Shiunbird! If I can get the Drobo Pro's working with El Capitan, then that storage may qualify as local storage - unless they mean internal storage, an while not blazingly fast they as orders of faster than going out on the cable again. If that's the case then a brace of old 1TB HD's plexed in the three extra drive bays isn't onerous; newegg is always running a deal on refurbished disks.

I already considered 3rd party iSCSI as a forgone conclusion. The (3) dual ported ReadyNAS boxes support a spritely iSCSI, as well as CIFS, NFS and AFS, and jumbo frames.

Stupid question for you; do you configure the server inline with the network - between the router/cable modem and the. Rest of the network. Or can it be placed like any other server as a leaf node. The former seems reasonable, but I've seen the latter in a diagram.

fu wrote: all sleek+tidy like your music-room sky

i could cut a short with your infrastructure :)

If you've seen it lately, you could do more than a short! I have the last Final Pro for Intel as well, and Final Pro X (for what it's worth) :-) I have a huge Blue Mic collection - it's magnificent!

Welp, I put three 2TB drives in and created a RAID 0 Volume, Server Caching took it fine, and I already have some downloads in the cache. This should help a lot since there is so much Apple gear here :-) Only having to go once to corporate will save a bunch!

One thing that irk's me is that the new server doesn't talk to the old server management, or visa versa. To have a 'single pane of glass', you need to choose one or the other. Also, the Lion server did not come with a S/N, so the file server doesn't export attached volumes. To make things simpler, I plan to move all the attached Drobo Pro storage up to a Quad 2.66Ghz server (the secondary), and reserve the quad 3.0Ghz (Primary) as a cache server using internal drives - mirrored as the cache. Then turn the old G5 Server off for reserve. According the thhe UPS, I'm pushing 3/4 of 1KW already.

Lion Server would still talk to Leopard Server. I suppose there is a canonical referee somewhere... but since all is done, I'm not going to investigate :-)

First bad problem. Seems that there has been a legacy problem lingering in the Drobo Pro space; It doesn't work correctly with FW800, which was the easiest way to hook it all up. I switched everything to USB, but there were reboots last night. I'll try again with iSCSI. If all else fails, back to Leopard server on the G5. The Drobo's were going to be rsync targets anyway so performance isn't a big problem. The Storage front ends will continue to be - trouble free - ReadyNAS Pro 6's

On another note, the Cache server is working well :)

OK, finally some lasting success with the Drobo Pro's. I had to put them back in the Leopard Server with (Drobo's single initiator) iSCSI and an 8 port switch on the secondary Ethernet port of the G5 Mac Pro. And It all works fine now. The Secondary Intel Mac Pro may serve iSCSI columns from the ReadyNAS's; however they already do excellent iSCSI - so there's some soul searching to identify some value-add to make it worth it, or perhaps some other features of the of recent will make more sense. As it is, I'm basking in some success in this venture for a while before I tackle the rsync mechanism's. :-)

Yes, and some I/O's were terminated. FWIW these bugs are confined to Drobo - old Drobo even. I started having problems with iSCSI last night in system.log. Not sure if this experiment if going to net out in favor of keeping the DroboPro's. They're EOL'd, so there are no fixes forthcoming. I'll putz around with it some more, if I don't get anywhere useful, I'll have to switch out the Drobo's for something else. Pity the ReadyNAS are working so well too.

After so, So, SO much screwing around with RAID box's, and OS X's, and Servers, and Mac Pro's; I've settled on one Quad 3Ghz Mac1,1, running El Capitan with Server 5.1.5 doing Caching, 'and some stuff', and one Quad 2.66Ghz Mac1,1 running Lion and Server 1.5.0 (The version of Server that runs on Lion - which is the last OS X that will run unmolested on a Mac Pro Mac1,1) - performing File Serving of the (4) Drobo Pro's connected via iSCSI (Butchered for the Drobo Box), and the last version of Drobo Dashboard that would run on a G5 - even though this is an Intel machine. XBench gives the Drobo Pro's a decent sequential Read/Write performance for large block transfers, except for small block read. The small block Write sequential performance is almost certainly due to buffering and thin provisioning - no surprise as that's why buffering with thin provisioning were designed like that. Random performance is what it always is with Hard Drives - a bummer. All in all, these out of date Drobo's are quite suitable for rsync and Time Machine targets; precisely what they're suppose to be.

Higher performance requirements are still well met by the ReadyNAS NAS/SAN machines.

It's pretty loud, but it's in the basement where it doesn't matter. Prices are good on Mac1,1's because they're stuck in the Apple-Stone Age :-) Methods for getting them running uptodate OS X all failed for me except the one where you doctor the boot.efi file on a machine that will run El Capitan. That worked repeatbly - no wonder, it's so simple.

If you polled the members of the board, you'd find most have more hardware that they need to achieve their goals. Mine is little different, except I planned for storage failure, in which case I may not have enough. In fact, I'm currently just coming off an all time low. What I used to have? woo boy!