Dante's offer

[Karl Berry]

    Karl and Rainer, could you please copy your correspondence concerning this
    machine to mailto:texlive@tug.org? 

It's actually Sebastian and Rainer.

    have what Mimi Jet has written to go on.

Mimi accurately summarized the situation as far as I know.
The mail doesn't add much, but here it is anyway.


Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 09:38:44 +0200 (MEST)
From: Rainer Schoepf <schoepf@uni-mainz.de>
To: Karl Berry <karl@cs.umb.edu>
Cc: thomas@gandalf.rhein.de, sebastian.rahtz@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk,
        vice@dante.de, jett@us.ibm.com, schoepf@uni-mainz.de
Subject: Re: [tug-board] Dante's offer of a Sun computer (Was: texlive
    machine)

Karl Berry writes:

 > I guess the real question is, what kind of machine is it (we wouldn't
 > want to overload it, especially if you're planning on using it for other
 > purposes), how much disk space is available (and could another one be
 > installed if necessary), etc.  By its nature producing texlive eats up a
 > lot of disk.

It's an UltraSparc I, 167MHz (I think). How much disk space do you
need?

Re a CD writer: would it be feasible to put some old PC hardware
running Linux, plus a CD writer next to it? I pretty sure such a beast
can be found at next to no cost.


Rainer


Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 10:27:07 +0100 (BST)
From: Sebastian Rahtz <sebastian.rahtz@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk>
To: schoepf@uni-mainz.de
Cc: karl@cs.umb.edu, thomas@gandalf.rhein.de, vice@dante.de
Subject: Re: [tug-board] Dante's offer of a Sun computer (Was: texlive
    machine)

Rainer Schoepf writes:
 > 
 > It's an UltraSparc I, 167MHz (I think). How much disk space do you
 > need?

not less than room for two complete copies of the build tree, and a
complete CD image. about 2 gigabytes. Plus a copy of CTAN NFS mounted
(I want to make `normal' sausage machines runs of "update LaTeX
contrib package XXX" entirely automated via a Web form).

 > Re a CD writer: would it be feasible to put some old PC hardware
 > running Linux, plus a CD writer next to it? I pretty sure such a beast
 > can be found at next to no cost.

Running a CD writer does need a reasonably decent box, but obviously
would not have to be bang up to date. But lets leave that aside; we
don't actually _want_ to write gold CDs that are in a machine room in
Germany :-} (unless of course you need it for other purposes). Since I 
have CD-writing facilities here at work, and at home, its not an
immediate problem.

assuming the disk space is there, lets do it...

sebastian


Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 16:51:17 +0200 (MEST)
From: Rainer Schoepf <schoepf@uni-mainz.de>
To: Sebastian Rahtz <sebastian.rahtz@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk>
Cc: karl@cs.umb.edu, thomas@gandalf.rhein.de, vice@dante.de,
        schoepf@uni-mainz.de, zierke@informatik.uni-hamburg.de
Subject: Re: [tug-board] Dante's offer of a Sun computer (Was: texlive
    machine)

(Note: Please include Reinhard Zierke
 <zierke@informatik.uni-hamburg.de> in further messages.)

Sebastian

 > not less than room for two complete copies of the build tree, and a
 > complete CD image. about 2 gigabytes. Plus a copy of CTAN NFS mounted

No problem. I need some time to set things up, as the second machine
is currently naked Solaris7, without any GNU stuff or other useful
software.

Actually, what I want to do is to move the FTP and WWW services to the
new machine. Then I can do the necessary OS upgrades and changes to
the old one without interrupting service. (It has a hardware problem
in its ethernet interface that can easily be repaired if I switch it
off for a day or two.)

So, I'd like to have some time to set things up properly. When do you
want to start?

 > assuming the disk space is there, lets do it...

Go forth and create masterpieces of the CD burning art? :-)

Rainer



Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 10:36:37 +0100 (BST)
From: Sebastian Rahtz <sebastian.rahtz@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk>
To: thomas@gandalf.rhein.de
Cc: karl@cs.umb.edu, vice@dante.de, schoepf@uni-mainz.de
Subject: Re: [tug-board] Dante's offer of a Sun computer (Was: texlive
    machine)

Thomas Koch writes:
 > > Volker _is_ President@dante.de, isnt he? I lose track of user group
 > > politics...
 > 
 > no, i am. :-)

whoops! my apologies!!!!!!

 >  i would suggest to include volker and rainer schoepf in
 > the addresslist of this discussion. rainer is actually the
 > administrator of the machine in question.

in that case I am very happy. i have utmost faith in Rainer after all
these years.

 > (btw: ... please no further politics! we had quite enough from
 > this sort of unpleasure.)
oh, go on. dont take away all the pleasure from life...

 > the machine is owned by dante and is sitting in the same rack together
 > with ftp.dante.de at computing center of mainz university. interactive
 > access should not be a problem (ssh preferred).
good. so its just an extension of the Dante services so far as Mainz
is concerned.

 > i actually have no idea about the name of the machine, but we can
 > register it in the dante.de domain. if there are reasons to have a
 > name in tug.org too, it should be possible (rainer?)
I am sure Karl and Rainer can sort that out

 > there is no cd-burning device available at the moment. any
 > suggestions? :-) 
lets forget that for the moment

 > we had some ideas about moving the dante-internal services like
 > mailing lists, interactive accounts of active members etc. to this
 > machine, and i see no reasons against serving texlive development and
 > other projects with this. 

sounds good

 > sebastian: how many people are involved with texlive-development?

if it got over 7 or 8 people with write access to the tree, i would
worry. the immediate list would be me, Kaja Christiansen, Art Ogawa,
Fabrice Popineau, Staszek W, Petr Olsak and Walter Schmidt

 > rainer and rheinhard zierke are the only administrators of our
 > machines and we have to watch carefully the administrative
 > expenses. 

I don't think the texlive stuff would cause any real extra burden. so
long as there _is_ a sysadmin who knows what is going on, and can eg
create a new account occasionally, I dont think Rainer and Reinhard
would really notice

sebastian


Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 16:19:18 +0100 (BST)
From: "Sebastian Rahtz" <sebastian.rahtz@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk>
To: schoepf@uni-mainz.de
Cc: karl@cs.umb.edu, thomas@gandalf.rhein.de, vice@dante.de,
        zierke@informatik.uni-hamburg.de
Subject: Re: [tug-board] Dante's offer of a Sun computer (Was: texlive
    machine)

Rainer Schoepf writes:
 > No problem. I need some time to set things up, as the second machine
 > is currently naked Solaris7, without any GNU stuff or other useful
 > software.

how about running Linux on it, for fun?

 > So, I'd like to have some time to set things up properly. When do you
 > want to start?

as soon as possible, but not as a matter of days. are you thinking of
the next few weeks, or longer?

sebastian


Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 17:38:58 +0200 (MEST)
From: Rainer Schoepf <schoepf@uni-mainz.de>
To: "Sebastian Rahtz" <sebastian.rahtz@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk>
Cc: karl@cs.umb.edu, thomas@gandalf.rhein.de, vice@dante.de,
        zierke@informatik.uni-hamburg.de, schoepf@uni-mainz.de
Subject: Re: [tug-board] Dante's offer of a Sun computer (Was: texlive
    machine)

Sebastian

 > how about running Linux on it, for fun?

Could do, but I doubt that there is already as much software for
Linux/sparc as for Slowaris.

 > as soon as possible, but not as a matter of days. are you thinking of
 > the next few weeks, or longer?

I'll try to set things up during the next two weeks.

Rainer