I'm finally learning a bit more about why I'm here doing this job that I'm doing. The business school where I work is trying to set up a fairly massive Oracle database which will contain all sorts of information, from who is enrolled in which class to the financial data that we have in a number of binary or ASCII data files on our main servers. It's sounding like it will be a massive thing. We've got a quad-processor Sun box (E425R, I think) with a RAID bank that will be running the database, eventually accessible via web, Java, and other front-ends (or so I'm told). Request Brokers and all of those fancy buzzwords were thrown at me. Certainly, Oracle is a nice database, but can't you just slap a PHP frontend on it and call it a day? (At least in the early stages?) Also, it seems like my efforts around here will go to waste if people are no longer logging into my boxen.. A web interface is just so sterile and with zero personality.. Then again, Solaris' ordinary personality really, really sucks..
Last login: Fri Aug 4 11:16:11 2000 from <...> Sun Microsystems Inc. SunOS 5.7 Generic October 1998 $ tpo^?^?^?^?^[[2~^?^[[F tpo: not found ??: not found : not found ?: not found [[2~: not found ?: not found ?: not found [[F: not found $ top top: not foundNOOOOOOOO!
At any rate, I just went put four copies of Seti@home on the server (they're really doing a number on the data chunks.. looks like about 10% every 30 minutes). Some Oracle guys will be coming in eventually to actually set up the database, but they want to have a good idea how it will be used before doing anything. Of course, nobody has really figured that out yet...
I have mentioned previously that I was working on a small NeXT box that has been gleefully serving web pages for years. They've been trying to port the backend of this thing over to NT for nearly the same amount of time. From what I can tell, it's just a medium-sized pile of Perl and TCL scripts. I'll have to see if it's hard to port it over to Linux or not. The box is not exactly in my jurisdiction, but only me and my boss are the only people around here who really seem to know how to administrate Unix-like systems...
Afternoon
Hmm.. I think I may pick up that 60 Gig Maxtor drive
tonight, or perhaps tomorrow sometime. Of course, what sort
of filesystem do you put on that thing? I
need journaling if it's going to be that
big. I see three options: ReiserFS,
Ext3, and GlobalFilesystem.
I'm kind of leaning toward GlobalFilesystem, just because I
don't have to travel far to physically beat on the
developers if something goes wrong ;-)