Hardware overload

[Pedro Melo]

Hi,

so after YAPC::EU'09 I started to collect hardware to put online and
smoke test stuff. So far I collected 3 of sparc station 2 (they are
slow to smoke test it seems, but I'm trying to cluster them together),
an IBM RS 6000, and today 2 Sun's R220. I'm also picking up a PowerPC
604e next month.

But I have a problem now: I don't have the space to fit the RS6000,
nor the second R220. The RS6000 is huge, 4U in height but double the
normal length, so it wont fit a normal rack. The second R220 I just
don't have the space.

So I'm looking for kind souls that want to take care of them, provided
that you use them for the benefit of the perl community.

I live in Portugal, so I would prefer to pass them along to someone in
Europe. Shipping this stuff to the US would be painfully expensive I
assume.

Best regards,

[David Golden]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 6:49 AM, Pedro Melo <me...@simplicidade.org> wrote:
> so after YAPC::EU'09 I started to collect hardware to put online and smoke
> test stuff. So far I collected 3 of sparc station 2 (they are slow to smoke
> test it seems, but I'm trying to cluster them together), an IBM RS 6000, and
> today 2 Sun's R220. I'm also picking up a PowerPC 604e next month.
>

> So I'm looking for kind souls that want to take care of them, provided that
> you use them for the benefit of the perl community.

Wow, that's an awesome collection and a generous offer. Thank you! I
hope someone in Europe has space in the server closet for it.

-- David

[Pedro Melo]

Hi,

Well, work got in the way of putting this stuff online (that and the
place where I was hosting this is currently unavailable, hope to
resolve that part soon), but I still have two leads for a couple of
alphas and another enterprise-grade Sun.

People are crazy: this RS6000 cost them a fortune at the time...

I'll try and take pictures for those who like to collect hardware porn.

Bye,

[David Cantrell]

I, unfortunately, don't. Thinking about priorities, the RS6000 (which I
assume runs AIX?) is the most needed, as there are already Solaris
smokers out there, but I don't think anyone regularly tests on AIX.

--
David Cantrell | Official London Perl Mongers Bad Influence

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life
-- Samuel Johnson

[Barbie]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 05:03:58PM +0000, David Cantrell wrote:
>
> I, unfortunately, don't. Thinking about priorities, the RS6000 (which I
> assume runs AIX?) is the most needed, as there are already Solaris
> smokers out there, but I don't think anyone regularly tests on AIX.

Only 72 reports [1] judging from my stats. Definitely worth pursuing if
we can :)

[1] http://stats.cpantesters.org/osmatrix-full.html

Cheers,
Barbie.
--
Birmingham Perl Mongers <http://birmingham.pm.org>
Memoirs Of A Roadie <http://barbie.missbarbell.co.uk>
CPAN Testers Blog <http://blog.cpantesters.org>
YAPC Conference Surveys <http://yapc-surveys.org>

[Martin Evans]

Barbie wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 05:03:58PM +0000, David Cantrell wrote:
>> I, unfortunately, don't. Thinking about priorities, the RS6000 (which I
>> assume runs AIX?) is the most needed, as there are already Solaris
>> smokers out there, but I don't think anyone regularly tests on AIX.
>
> Only 72 reports [1] judging from my stats. Definitely worth pursuing if
> we can :)
>
> [1] http://stats.cpantesters.org/osmatrix-full.html
>
> Cheers,
> Barbie.

I have access to AIX 4.3 on a powerpc - it may be an rs6000 - so long
since I used it I have forgotten. It does not have a lot of disk space
left but I could look in to running a smoker on it. Any recommendations
for a low disk space smoker running with the minimal amount of
management and least risk of breaking the box? I currently run
CPAN::Reporter::Smoker on Linux and watch it like a hawk (control c'ing
a lot of tests which hang or prompt then add them to disabled.yml) but
don't worry too much about it breaking the machine as it is mine but it
may upset someone here if I broke the aix box badly.

Martin

[M W487]

http://stats.cpantesters.org/osmatrix-full.html

Dang, that is a NICE table. Does it have a prominent link on a popular page?

[Martin Evans]

Well I tried but didn't get very far. I managed to build perl 5.10.1 and
set up cpan shell but whenever I try and install CPAN::Reporter the
machine runs out of memory ("perl -MCPAN -e shell" has it all) and the
system kills the cpan shell.

Martin

[David Golden]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 6:14 AM, Martin Evans <martin...@easysoft.com> wrote:
> Well I tried but didn't get very far. I managed to build perl 5.10.1 and
> set up cpan shell but whenever I try and install CPAN::Reporter the
> machine runs out of memory ("perl -MCPAN -e shell" has it all) and the
> system kills the cpan shell.

BinGOs might have some suggestions for minismokebox and a lightweight
backend. CPAN likes to create an object for every indexed
distribution (needed or not) and that sucks up a huge amount of
memory. (I should really look into making that lazy one of these
days...)

-- David

[Serguei Trouchelle]

Martin Evans wrote:

> Well I tried but didn't get very far. I managed to build perl 5.10.1 and
> set up cpan shell but whenever I try and install CPAN::Reporter the
> machine runs out of memory ("perl -MCPAN -e shell" has it all) and the
> system kills the cpan shell.

You may want to try to install manually (perl Makefile.PL && make && make test && make install) following packages
before running CPAN shell:

DBI
DBD-SQLite
CPAN-DistnameInfo
File-HomeDir
libwww-perl
CPAN-SQLite

Then set use_sqlite to 1 in CPAN/Config.pm:

'use_sqlite' => q[1],

After this, memory consumption of CPAN shell should decrease.
You can speed up index rebuilding by having other CPAN shell (on more powerful machine) rebuilding index and copying
cpandb.sql to your box's ~/.cpan

--
Serguei Trouchelle