From smj Mon Aug 12 19:38:19 2002 Return-Path: Received: (from smj@localhost) by otaku.freeshell.org (8.11.3/8.11.6) id g7CJcJP02518 for martians; Mon, 12 Aug 2002 19:38:19 GMT Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2002 19:38:19 GMT From: Stephen Jones Message-Id: <200208121938.g7CJcJP02518@otaku.freeshell.org> Subject: SDF news, MetaARPA, DynaDNS .. funding X-Keywords: X-UID: 76 Status: RO Content-Length: 5758 Lines: 103 Hey SDFers .. just a quick update! Bulletin list: * Funding goals, T-Shirts shipping! * New machines and storage arrays due for install * DynaDNS, LISTSERV, MetaARPA and Communal Computing -FUNDING-------------------------------------------------------------------- First off, thanks to all of you who continually sponsor SDF. We're near the midpoint of our '120' wait period for 501(c)3 IRS tax exemption. I'm hoping to hear from them any day now! The T-Shirts are almost all completely sold. Please use 'order' to check your status. About half have shipped and we're waiting for shipping address confirmation for the others. We definately will be able to cover costs and we're projecting to add $1500 to $2000 to this quarter's funding! Last quarter wasn't so hot, we were short about $1568 :( We welcome your donations. The easiest way to donate is to join another membership level such as VHOST, TWEAK, DNS, VPM, SERVER or ROBOT. You can also run the 'pledge' command which will allow you to commit to a monthly or annual pledge to SDF. You will receive a single email reminder (either once a month or once a year depending on how what you choose). You can send your donation via POST or PAYPAL: SDF Public Access UNIX System support@freeshell.org Post Office Box 1270 Bellevue WA 98009-1270 Other membership level information can be found at http://sdf.lonestar.org --NEW MACHINES-------------------------------------------------------------- Our current machines aren't that bad at all .. infact, in the MFLOP tests they do quite well and verge on 'super computing' status. Our slowest machines are two SUN SS20s which will be the first to be replaced with new machines. ARPA member 'corey' and I have been running Matrix Multiplication tests as well as Prime Number calculations to bench mark the old and new machines. In some cases we found that the new machines (which can run optimised code at 3.3GFLOPS) actually out do the current hardware by up to 8 times! This allows us to focus on larger projects and gets us further away from the 'ISP' or 'webhost' areas that commercial businesses handle. While we can still do those and in most cases do them better than commercial service providers, I'd like to try to focus our attention to more interesting projects such as Genome research and perhaps even SETI (though some feel thats a waste of time :) Also, I'd like your creativity to show.. I will write more about this when I talk about 'COMMUNAL COMPUTING' Also, bjork has been running NetBSD 1.6F SMP (and previous SMP) kernels for several months now. The 1.5ZC kernel was pretty stable and we've not had so much luck with the 1.6 kernel .. but I suppose its best we continue to work with it. When 1.6 is ready for release, I'd like to move all our machines (as they all have more than one processor) to the new version. To match our processing power, I've also donated 20 36.4GB SCA SCSI drives to replace our 4.3gb and 9.1gb drives. I'm also looking at clustering software such as 'clusterit' so that we can make the most out of servers and hopefully achieve a combined processing power of 21.1GFLOPS. --NEW FEATURES-------------------------------------------------------------- I'd like to begin experimenting with Dynamic DNS. Dynamic DNS is most helpful to users who can spend unlimited time online, but when they dialup or make a DSL or cable connection, they are assigned an IP address from a pool. What I'm proposing is an annual pledge for this sort of feature where the user can run a script or interactively edit their DNS record and submit it for an update. Please post on the BBOARD: if you are interested. Another longtime asked for feature is a list server such as majordomo .. I've not had enough people ask for it, so I've not really set it up.. Again, post on BBOARD: if you would use this and what would you donate say on an annual basis for such a feature. I should stress .. SDF's GOAL is not to be a cheap ISP .. in many respects its first goal is to be a free resource to a certain extent. Unfortunately it can not be infinitely free, because sdf's financial resource (you & ME!) are not infinitely rich. So how can we do this? Okay, we have a portion of services that are free .. these services out do most any shell provider and definately out do hotmail, yahoo and any other spam farm out there. The next step is pledges and dues .. these are higher membership levels .. keeping them cheaper than commercial providers while at the same time exceeding the quality of commercial providers. Also something more important than that, we *all* have built a community together that we share in everyday. We have hardware that exceeds the capacity of most ISPs (did you know?) and while their machines might be able to squeeze out a few hundred million floating point operations per second, we're looking at doing 21.1GFLOPS .. I think we can achieve much more than just funding SDF. I think we can provide a public resource for independent researchers and 'smart kids'. Also, I believe that most of our members are very talented programmers. We could easily design the next 'killer app' here on SDF if not a slew of cool net clients and servers. Another idea is similar to sourceforge .. but rather than just having a bunch of software packages (a really large bunch) we could somewhat refine our free software with maybe peer review? If nothing, with having over 20000 members we certainly would have one of the largest testing groups. Its not about competeting with FSF or SourceForge but just bring the ideas to the next level. You're welcome to post on the bboard .. which BTW has some improved browsing features ;-) SMJ