mermaid
- an imaginary sea creature fabled to have a woman's head and upper body
and a fish's tail. [C14: from mere lake, inlet + maid]
How and when machine obtained:
- Mermaid was bought in 1996 with money saved from Coke sales, and with
member donations. It was bought as components from City Business
Machines.
History prior to arrival at UCC:
- There was none, as it was born at UCC.
UCC history of machine:
- Mermaid has had many configuation changes, adjustments, hacks and
tweakings in its short life, as it has proved somewhat unreliable.
Most of this has been due to the heat produced by the CPU - in our
haste to buy something new and non-Intel, we bought one of the early
Cyrix 6x86es, and put it on one of the first boards to be certified
for it. Aside from eating two IDE disks in two years, Mermaid seems to
now be (semi) stable.
- Mermaid had a CPU change mid-1999 as the Cyrix chip proved unstable.
It is now a Intel Pentium 166 and significant improvements speed and
stability have been noticed.
- Mermaid died several times during 2002 due to overheating. It was
transplanted and appears to once again be stable.
- In 2005 it was transplanted into a dual 400MHz Pentium II and serves
as a Xen host.
- In 2006 it suffered another disk failure, but swapping the controller
board with a spare that [DAG] happened to have lying about worked
fine.
- In late 2007, Mermaid moved to yet another set of new hardware but
kept the same name - a dual Xeon with 2GB of RAM. It stopped being a
general user box and web server, and took over duties as a Xen
virtualisation host.
Current machine tasks:
Current software configuration:
- Mermaid runs Debian Etch
- Linux 2.6-xen
Current hardware configuration:
- Dual 2.4GHz Intel Xeon processors
- 2GB RAM
Future plans for machine:
- Decommission, possibly move Mermaid's disk image to a Xen virtual
machine
Special notes:
- Beware the 6x86. Cram as many fans as you can inside the case.!
Thanks:
- [AHC], [TDH], and [DAG] for finding drives to replace the dead ones,
at short notice.
Related sites: