After looking for those laptop cdroms, finally found two on eBay for an insanely cheap price. I got one for $10.50 US and the other for $3.99 US with a $12 US shipping cost totaling $26.49 US. That’s is really quite good, even though they don’t burn cds. Gotta love eBay 
Besides that, I have been looking for some cool lighting effects for this cluster. And this is just amazing. Here’s a pic of one:
Isn’t that something? Not sure if I’ll go with one or two of those because they take up quite a bit of power, but still it is just amazing. Might have to go with cold cathode lights instead.
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Ok, after some more discussions and planning, I changed the PSU again to this I’ll still go with the DC to DC converters, but it seems that each converter has a different form factor to fit each type of motherboard. I guess I’ll order the specific one after I choose the motherboards for my cluster.
Besides the PSU issues, I’m going to be getting some older laptop style cdroms. Even though they cannot burn any cds, they use very little power and are much smaller than normal sized cdroms. This is particularly helpful since two of the normal sized ones would just barely fit on an 8×12 inch plate. Plus, I’m hoping to get the two laptop cdroms extremely cheap. Now all I need to look for is some mini-itx motherboards.
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Seems there were some large storms last night in Slovenia (where my blog is hosted) and knocked out the power there, so this site and the Clusterix site has been down for a quite a while. Hopefully, everything is now better over there 
In other news, seems I think I finally settled down with a solution to the power supply for my cluster. That black power brick I mentioned yesterday should do the trick in combination with two DC to DC converters on the motherboards. Now I just need some more parts.
Also, seems Linux-Magazine has published a “Knoppix-Collection” DVD that includes just about everything except Morphix and Clusterix (well I can understand that Clusterix isn’t in there). Kanotix, Gnoppix, ZoneCD, and GNUstep to name a few. Seems Morphix didn’t make it because it was included last year in a DVD according to Alex. Oh well, at least three Morphix derivatives made it
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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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