Let’s start with the good news: most of Excelsior has arrived and it’s already set up. The only thing that is missing is … the CPUs, which are coming in from Philadelphia, and should arrive here tomorrow, standing to Amazon’s tracking. As I said, the server will be co-located by my current employer, so that’s one issue not to worry about.
Without Yamato, it turns out that my ability to bump the version of my own packages is vastly reduced, mostly because I don’t want to install packages such as MongoDB on this laptop just to test out Ruby Gems, and at the same time I don’t want to have too many extraneous packages installed. Luckily this means that starting tomorrow we should be all ready to start the install phase.
One of the things I’ve been keeping busy with was the split hardware IDs package — sys-apps/hwids, which I’m bumping weekly. This from one side makes it much less important to use the (now gone) network cron scripts to update the IDs files, and on the other allows people who don’t want their systems to access the network directly to be kept up-to-date with the files themselves. This is the first week I’m skipping over the bump, simply because … there is no new content!
I’ve added a new device today to the USB IDs database though so that should mean that next week we might have an update. And tomorrow I’ll probably update it with the possibly missing subsystem IDs for the devices on Excelsior, which will go to the PCI IDs database where I already sent my laptop’s and one of the local server’s subsystems.
Speaking about device identification I can understand why Kay thinks that it might be better to have a general database of everything, instead of multiple small databases… for instance it would be nice if I could just update one database with the IDs of my new external HDD (WD My Passport), and let smartctl know that it has to connect to it with the SAT method, instead of having to write it on a page and then remember about it myself. Speaking about which, WD still is my favourite HDD vendor.
Anyway, thanks once more to all the people who helped the new Excelsior to be built; tomorrow I’ll post a few more details about it, including some photos hopefully, as I’ve got my camera with me as well. There has actually been some trouble with the SSDs and the mounting bays, which I think would be a valuable lesson not only for me.
