Forgot to post this. Check out this link:
http://www.slipperyskip.com/page10.html
Isn’t that just amazing? The cluster is actually built inside a humidor. Almost a perfect idea for another project I have in mind, but that’s another day. Also might have found a solution with the power supply issues for my cluster. Seems all I need is a black power brick for an AC to DC converter, cutting back the price tremendously. Check out this one.
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Got a pic of the cut plates and the mounted hard drive disks:
Looks nice, doesn’t it? Heh, well maybe not, but at least its something 
Anyway, been looking for a solution for the power supply for the cluster. Seems it isn’t as easy as I thought. The normal ATX PSUs found in normal PCs only have one ATX connector for the motherboard. And, the power supply actually connects to the motherboard for power on. There has been someone who has made a Y connector to connect two motherboards, but there are issues with it. The other option is using these DC to DC converters and a AC to DC converter. This might be a good solution if I can get them cheaply.
In other news, I got some good help from paul_c for the backport of mini_fo for Clusterix. Seems he will help work on the port for me which will be great, as I really have no idea what I was doing 
Should have more info on that soon.
Besides that, also finished up my “Week of Horror” today with a Discrete Mathematics exam. Seems I didn’t study enough for it, as at least three questions I wasn’t really sure on, but hopefully I’ll still get an A on it. Bah, math usually comes extremely easy to me, but this type of math hasn’t been too easy.
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Decided today was the day to start really working on my home made cluster/computer. Took out my 16 gauge steel plate, measured the 3 8×12 inch pieces and decided to cut them with a Dremel-like rotary tool. Thought the little cutting wheel would have worked quite well. But, to my surprise, I must have went through at least 15 of them to cut through the metal and took a couple of hours to complete. Should have thought about using another tool, but I really didn’t have any other means to cut it. Oh well, it took a while, but at least it worked.
After cutting them, I decided to use some metal sand paper to smooth over the cut sides and sand the main surfaces to give it a brushed steel look (yea, like MacOS X). Came out quite nice.
I then wanted to put some holes in one of the plates for the hard drives. First drive went in quite easily. But the second was a real pain. Seemed while I was drilling the hole for one of the holes, the drill had slid slightly from where it should have drilled and made the whole thing go off. Took a long time to correct, and still isn’t fully fixed. But, nevertheless, it looks alright (except to my perfectionist’s eye).
I’ll be posting some of pics of what was done tomorrow.
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The cluster I mentioned from my last post I think will be a reality for me. I just bought a 12 inch by 24 inch 16 gauge steel plate to make a small version of the original cluster. Going to cut that up into 3 8×12 inch plates to mount probably two VIA EPIA Mini-ITX motherboards, two hard drives, two cdroms, one psu, some KVM switch so only one keyboard, mouse, and monitor, and maybe a router for the networking. I’m going to try to make both machines act as one unit, so when I hit the power button, it boots both motherboards. Should be quite interesting when I’m done, and quite effective for developing and testing Clusterix.
Also, I’m now two thirds of the way done with my “Week of Horror.” The CS exam I had today seemed quite simple so I should get a good grade Last exam is on Thursday, but it shouldn’t be too bad.
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This is just amazing, someone has actually taken 12, that’s right, 12 mini-itx motherboards with processors and made an entire cluster out of them by stacking one over the other. I am definitely considering making one of these for Clusterix development and testing, although it will prolly be just two or three node system. But in any case, this is just an amazing idea and definitely something I will write about in the future on how to make one of these with Clusterix, instead of FreeBSD and MPICH, which the creator used. More Info.
Also, I’m now a third of the way through my “Week of Horror” as I had my first graded exam/quiz (ok just a large quiz) for the week. I have two more real exams to do these next few days and a couple of bits for my web design course.
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Well, its 11 pm Sunday, and got a whole bunch of exams/quizzes this week. Bah, won’t be nice this week, but it could be worse (like last semester).
Also, a SlashDot article pointed out that an organization from Europe for monitoring votes and elections in third world countries that have unstable democracies will be looking over this upcoming US elections. Heh, can’t blame them. Between what happened in Florida and the switch to insecure electronic voting machines, the group definitely has a point. More Info
Besides this, I have found (with help of bhartshorn) that some hacks in the linuxrc file of Clusterix to be quite buggy. The toram boot option does not work now, so I’ll have to figure out what is going on with it.
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Err, according to this article it seems that almost everywhere in NJ (where I moved from a year and a half ago) makes the most unwired city list, meaning NJ prolly has the most wireless networks per square mile. Now here in KY, seems only one city made it, and thats a fairly long ways from where I am. Bah, oh well, at least my college has a wireless network (if you want to call it that, it really doesn’t work at times).
Also, according to a SlashDot article, somebody actually overclocked an Intel chip to 6 ghz. This is just amazing, seems we will soon see some pretty darn fast chips if Intel, AMD, and IBM can break the 90 nanometer mark. Heres some info on the overclock.
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Well, just couldn’t resist showing these pics of the new iMac G5 someone got. I know this will show as my 4th post, but I don’t care  Check these out:
http://mactree.sannet.ne.jp/~kodawarisan/imacg5/imacg501.html
Good Stuff
Gonna get me one of those soon.
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After much work by my poor development machine (200 mhz Pentium MMX), both kernels are now compiled and ready to be added to the Clusterix base. I’d think it probably took over 24 hours to get the two kernels compiled the way I wanted them (5-6 hours for each compile). The goal for the next release is to have a 2.4.27 kernel patched with openMosix, Squashfs, Bootsplash and Knoppix-kernel and a 2.6.7 kernel patched with Adeos, Squashfs and Bootsplash patches. I will also setup the boot menu so a user can choose which kernel he wants to boot.
In addition to the two kernel scheme, I’m also looking into replacing translucency with mini_fo. I’ve noticed that the 2.4 kernel translucency version seems to be causing some issues that really are prohibiting some of the features of Clusterix. Mini_fo on the other hand, seems much more promising than trans, especially for 2.6.x kernels. However, the newer version of mini_fo only works with 2.6.x kernels, so that leaves me with a problem since I can’t use it with my 2.4.27 kernel. However, I think the creator of the 2.6 version will help me out to port it back to 2.4.
Besides this, I’m also gathering up some more clustering softwares to put in the next release, but not sure which ones will make it.
In other news, seems next week will be a nasty week for me. It seems I have either an exam or project due in every course I’m taking for this upcoming week. Oh well, another week without much Clusterix development, but thats alright, I might actually get some more ideas for it  At least today is nice and quiet so I maybe can get something done. (Clusterix is now dead. This post is for historical reference only.)
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If anyone actually noticed, I’m the creator of the LiveCD Linux distro called Clusterix. Clusterix is based off of Morphix, but will and does now include additional clustering softwares. It also includes other mods that I have done to Morphix as well. For more info, check out http://clusterix.livecd.net. (Clusterix is now dead. This post is for historical reference only.)
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