[Debian-ppc64-devel] is this port alife?

[Harald Görl]

Andreas Schuldei wrote:
> Actually i think it would be better to make the machine part of
> the "alternative" buildd network (at http://buildd.net ). that is

Hi Andreas.
Yes, that is an option of course. We should discuss this with Bastian 
(and Sven) perhaps? Not sure how Bastian thinks about that.

> regarding the services that could be put on those machines
> besides the buildd and porter machine, how much bandwidth do we
> have at our disposal? how is the site connected?

Well, that is a simple question but there is not a really simple answer. 
The machines are using the Backbone network all German Universities are 
using. One connection from our University to the "outside" is 155MBit/s. 
Nothing is limited right now for the OpenPower subnet.

But the OpenPower are behind a 10/100MBit/s Ethernet switch, which could 
easily be changed to 1000MBit/s, but i don't think this is a problem 
right now... If it makes some sense for "intelligent applications" on 
these machines we can upgrade the connection.

> it all started out at debconf5 when wiggy ran benchmarks on the
> machine we had there and was impressed with it. the plan was to
> get one to host the new alioth. then people (i specifically
> recall zobel) pointed out that we did not have official buildds
> for ppc64. i think we used one partition on that box for a month
> after debconf to that end. 

Do you know the machine/processor type?

> so i had contacts to people at IBM in the linux/open source
> development center in the US and asked them for one for debian,
> both for alioth and for porting purposes and have been prodding
> people the whole time since then. very recently i got the answer
> that there was no money for a machine for the debian project.
> they did not know about the three machines in Augsburg, though.

Oh no! Could you please say when you asked them? I'm just interested, 
perhaps this is something that should be documented as an example for 
VERY BAD contact/communication management. Well, i'm sure that this is 
not only a mistake on IBM's side... As Sven already said, more things 
went really bad with these machine donation. But it is not too late, so 
go on with it.

> i then approached OSDL, since i heared they had power5s there and
> asked if we could have one of theirs, or at least free access to
> a couple of partitions on it. but that is hard, aparently, for
> various reasons. the final word on this has not been spoken yet,
> though. But the Augsburg solutions seems to be much better then
> OSDL, i guess. i will tell them we dont need their box. 

I can't say anything about the OSDL machines of course. But feel free to 
use the machines here.

Bastian, if you think two (physical) machines are not enough right now, 
let us discuss about the third one. The third one is only for public 
accounts, right now there are about 1700 of these accounts for testing 
and porting issues. And there are some really interesting projects/ports 
on it. But perhaps we could also use some additional partitions on this 
machine...

Harald