3rd of April

Farm news
The weather is cooler now so I am managing to get a bit of work done. Last week I managed to get a 3 of the Intel-GPU machines running CPDN work all weekend. They have some HadCM3S (short) work units that only take around 16 hours to process. The bad news is they produce 2 upload files each that are 64Mb, so then they kill the internet connection as they all try and upload at the same time. I restricted the number of uploads for them to try and improve things. This week I am running more of them, but only on two machines.

The 6 core 12 thread machines are running Seti work at the moment. I'm trying to get the Seti credits up to the Einstein credits (they are about 200,000 less). The only Einstein work I am running at the moment is on the Raspberry Pi2's and Parallella's.


Proxy server
I've been running Squid 2.7 for some years now without any updates, so the last month has seen me updating it to something more current and try and get it to behave. One advantage to this is I can finally use HTTP 1.1 (just as they release 2.0). Squid 2.7 only supported HTTP 1.0. There is some more fiddling and optimising I need to do that takes time. This was further complicated by getting a new router which has various firmware bugs and loses some settings when rebooted.


NTP
There was a security bug discovered with NTP (the Network Time Protocol) and the Linux guys were pretty quick with a fix. The problem was they now ignore user settings. That lead to some late nights and trying to work out why it seemed to ignore my config settings and do something totally different to what it used to do. The init script that starts it up uses its own dchp derived config file so I had to fix the ntp init script to point to my config file.

The fix version seems a bit behind the "official" release from the ntp.org website which is up to 4.2.8p1. I expect the Linux guys will update to that eventually.


Future purchases
I'm looking at the network infrastructure at the moment and what needs to be done to make it more secure and reliable. I suspect a new (dedicated) proxy server and possibly new file server may be on the shopping list. More on this when I have a better idea how to organise the network.