Further Follow-ups

[Christopher Browne]

On 5/5/05, John Macdonald <john-Z7w/En0MP3xWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Power:
> 
> There are a number of wall outlets around the room for power
> (maybe 4 or 5? and I don't know whether they are on separate
> circuits).  I don't think you need a separate circuit for
> every pair of computers, but this may still be a limitation if
> you get 20 or more computers going.

If power turns out to be a problem, one answer would be to bring in a
few UPSes.  That would "filter out" the extra power drawn at powerup
time for any given PC.  It doesn't take that much power to keep them
going; the challenge is to get them started.  Of course, that means
some lead acid batteries to lug around :-(.

> Internet:
> 
> I have no idea whether there is Internet access; I would
> guess not, but I have seen computers running in other parts
> of the building so this is not a certain problem.  If they
> do not have Internet available, you could still get by if you
> use a digital cell phone interface.  (Shop around carefully,
> $10/MB seems to be the going price for "excess" usage, but
> Telus at least has an unlimited plan for $100/month and they
> may prorate the charge if you cancel again after using it
> for a portion of the month.  Rogers, on the other hand, does
> not have an unlimited data plan.)  I'm going to be using this
> setup for the Perl6/PUGS Hackathon at my cottage just before
> the YAPC::NA conference in June, so I'll have exact info,
> including the after-the-fact hidden surprises kind of info,
> by mid-July.  This connection is rated at 100 Mb/s but I've
> been told that works out more like 60 Mb/s in practice -
> a bit faster than a dial-up modem.

This sort of thing makes it vital to have ONE machine that is the
"gateway machine" which lets you NFS mount as much as possible as well
as having a Squid proxy so that files get reused as heavily as
possible across installs.  Indeed, it would be worthwhile to "prime
the cache" while on a fast network :-).
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