Clockfort's Tech Blog

Made major progress (between the hours of 12AM and 6:30AM) this morning on getting the most recent pull of Bell Lab’s Plan 9 sources to work quite right under CSH’s Xen cluster (running Xen 3.3). Ethernet interface not currently working. That’d be nice to have. :-/

After that, though, I hope to port some house services over to a superior operating system :-)

I also got a book on 8088 assembly with which I hope to enhance the capabilities of our IBM PCJr. My roommate (Alex Grant, webmaster for CSH) started a BBS-like service for it, which is running in our room.

My friends Bob and Will are still convincing me to learn IA64 assembly and work with them porting plan9 to this platform… they may be crazy. That said, I’m on page 48 of an IA64 reference guide :-) It’s a pretty sweet architecture, really, but there are quite a few “gotchas” for assembly programmers that I could see making writing compilers and kernels hard. Ah well.

Dealt with a lot of computer issues today – woke up at 5:30am or so with Angelo Dinardi and Chris Deslandes to pop over to CSH’s server room, and safely power down/disconnect our equipment before RIT took down their electrical grid to tie in a new transformer.
Our move of physically disconnecting our machines from the wall was a good one – We lost an AC unit when power came back on, likely due to a power spike. A few services didn’t start up, and many user rack machines refused had issues, but all in all, I would say the experience was not all so bad.

Angelo and I took the chance to do some tidying up of cabling and reracking some of the servers in a better layout, that worked out pretty well.

Angelo was the one who got to push the big red button to cut power to the three-phase power to the server racks… this time. He looked back on his experiences of power outages of OpComm’s past… someday, he thought, he would be the older RTP who had the privilege of hitting the infamous Red Button… and so he was. Someday, Internet, it will be my turn to push the Red Button. Someday.
(Probably next year :-P Don’t tell Chris!)

Also, hey, got to talk to a lot of alumni today.
… when their user rack machines didn’t turn back on. Ah well.