12th of July

Farm news
Most of the farm picked up some more climate models last week so we're running them out now. There are no more ANZ models for the time being. Given they take a week and a few machines have spare work units it will be at least another week before they are all done.

I fired up one of the GPUgrid crunchers and its been steadily crunching through their work units, some short ones (only 4 hours) and some long (up to 12 hours). Once the backlog of climate models are done I will get the second GPUgrid machine running. I am waiting on one particular machine to complete its final model in about 20 hours.

I replaced the power supply in the backup file server so now its quiet again. I managed to use the power supply I got last week. I had to break the last 4 pins off the motherboard power connector so it fits the old Pentium 4 motherboard. I used the machine last week to do some experimentation with Debian and the latest version of the Squid (proxy server). I used a spare hard drive that I swapped in. This week its back to its former self.

It turns out Debian install a firewall by default but it has no rules and so doesn't actually do anything.  I tried the recommended rules and had to add a couple of my own. While doing regular housekeeping on the Pi's and Parallella's today I added the same settings so hopefully they are a bit more secure now.


Internet gateway
Now the file server and the backup file server are done another little "project" I have going is to set up a machine as an internet gateway. Not like your domestic grade router/firewall but having more advanced features like caching and virus scanning. I could just buy one but they get expensive. I was looking at an F5 but they are more of a load balancer.

I have given the computer shop some specs (motherboard, case and power supply) and as seems to happen quite regularly now they and their suppliers don't have the parts. There is no rush to get this implemented so I can wait. While the hardware is ordered I have yet to decide on the software that it will run.