[GTALUG] Build critique request and the story behind it.

[Russell]

On November 19, 2017 12:36:09 PM EST, "D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk" <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
>| From: Russell via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
>
>| Adding in the cost of the LAN case I'm $250 over my price point.
>
>What's a LAN case?  Local Area Network?
>
>| However 
>| that point didn't figure in the cost of driving from store to store
>and 
>| checking out the deals in 1994 and then ordering and driving back to 
>| pick it up. This was all time and money for me back in the day. In
>1994 
>| it cost me $50 dollars a day to start my truck, not counting gas.
>
>It's not very meaningful to compare 1994 and 2017 prices.  And the
>retail marketplace is way different.
>
>Compared with 2012 prices, current prices seem high to me.

In 2012 the CAD/US exchange rate was 1:1; in 94 it was .73 and 2016 .75. 

In my mind I used a sort of social equity metric in that; what I'm buying now is positioned in the same middle ground of what is currently affordable over the counter, as it was with my last fully new parts computer in 1994.

<snip Moore's law etc.>

>Modern memory systems are quite a lot more flexible than old ones.  
>Memories don't need to be matched (but a slow one will probably slow
>down 
>a fast one).
>
>| I wish I was better at math.
>
>This doesn't seem like math to me.  But then my math environment isn't 
>normal.
>
>Apparently "math phobia" is a thing that one can absorb from the 
>environment.  There's a whole literature about this and the damage is 
>does.

I failed math horribly in grade 9. So did most of my class. I guess to hide the fact that maybe there was a problem with the teacher, or the methods, they graded us on the curve till enough people had passed. I still only scored 36%
>
>| I attribute some of my confusion to having 
>| been frightened off math by my having viewed the machine math room at
>my 
>| vocational school. All those heavy welded tables sorting punch cards,
>
>| all that noise concentrated in a small room brrrr, gave me the
>willies.
>
>That sounds like "unit record" equipment.  Not really good for math.  
>Generally used for accounting up until the early or mid 1960s.  The few
>
>classrooms that had them probably kept them a long time since they had 
>been quite expensive.  Keypunches lasted perhaps 15 years longer than
>the 
>other unit record equipment.
>
>Band saws and open-hearth forge fans would be louder.

I took printing, at least the machines weren't working full bore all the time. I hand set type from the California Job Case, used the Linotype machine, negative etched emulsions to create plates for forms and made the companion plates for used for printing the table metadata on the form. Also darkroom photography and a bunch of other interesting markup tools. 
>
>(In my shop class, the forge used coal which we had to coke before
>using.)

Wow, you can coke coal ... cool eh?

>
>| Offhand I'm planning to put /home and /opt on the 3TB drive but if
>you 
>| have any recommendations for an optimal partitioning scheme for the
>SSD, 
>| in order to reduce writes as an effort to prolong service life, I'd 
>| appreciate it.
>
>If you do the arithmetic (necessarily guestimates) SSDs will probably
>last 
>as long as you'll want to use them, and longer.
>
>In my limited experience, SSDs typically fail more abruptly and
>completely than HDDs.  So backups are even more important.
>
>Since I'm lazy about backups, I generally put the OS on the SSD and my 
>stuff on the HDD.  At least when I have both SSD and HDD.  But fewer of
>my 
>computers have HDDs at all.  And I really should do more backups.
>
>I find modern desktops (Windows and Linux) cry out for SSD performance.
>
>I'm setting up CentOS 7 on a little computer that came with a 32G SSD. 
>
>That's fine for the OS + 10G swap (I

Interesting, how did you decide on 10G, this doesn't look like the standardly recommended1.5 - 2xRAM.

 added a 2T HDD for /var and
>/home).  
>Your SSD is 512G so it would be a waste to use it just for the OS.

I was thinking of partitioning /boot using existing Grub2 inode limits, then use 512-byte inodes on the rest of the filesystem. Not exactly sure why except for a vague idea that, having headroom in SElinux policy metadata headers, if used on a dedicated IPV6 LAN, might work out ok. I've never actually tried to tune a Linux filesystem, thought I might have at it now, see how it goes.
_
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-- 
Russell