[frgeek-michiana] Lab Notes - 6/ 5/2007
- From: Tom Brown <tbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: FreeGeek Michiana <frgeek-michiana@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 07 Jun 2007 10:39:30 -0500
:: New Recycling Offer
A recycling aggregator submitted a proposal to John. The vendor rep laid
out clear transportation and monitor costs which allow us to predict our
costs.
- transport: $10 per skid
- bad monitors: $9 each
- good monitors: no charge
On the revenue side, the rep won't give us advance prices the company
will likely pay for circuit boards, sorted metal and plastic, etc. The
vendor will give us prices only after receiving and inspecting our
material.
Illustrations per gaylord/skid:
- 20 bad monitors would cost $190: $180 + $10.
- 20 good monitors would cost $10.
- Skid of mixed plastic is $10 to ship and likely no revenue.
- Gaylord of circuit boards would cost $10 to ship. We would get
something in return after inspection.
This offer is not great because we don't know what to expect on the
revenue side. Otoh, we know the vendor will accept all of our materials.
We can clear out the warehouse and keep material flowing through it
instead of accumulating. The transport costs are reasonable in
comparison to commercial shipping to Chicago.
Is this offer acceptable overall?
No one proposed that we accept or reject the offer so we didn't take a
vote.
Think about the offer. If you have any questions or opinions, please
post them to the list. We'll decide in the few weeks whether to accept
the offer.
:: More Modem Drivers for Puppy
After a year of despairing that we are unable to meet our mission in
full, our newly chosen low-resource distro appears to have saved our bacon.
Mike announced that Puppy now recognizes and installs the correct driver
for the Acer USB modem we have at the lab, which is based on a popular
Lucent chip. The modem works on Puppy on his dial-up line at home.
Puppy Linux now supports two relatively inexpensive modems and will
support more in the near future. Mike mentioned a few more modems Puppy
will support shortly. I didn't note them. Maybe Mike will post them to
the list.
Mike speculated that we can use the PL scripts and drivers in VL with
little modification. For the most part, he was able to follow the
detection and identification shell script in the latest PL version.
There are some confusing sections due to numerous branching statements.
:: Warehouse Restroom Announcement
Some folks, possibly in our merry band of Geeks, put paper towels on the
stool lids in the restroom at the warehouse. Then they toss the paper
towels on the floor when done. Or worse, in the stools.
Mario, the maintenance guy at RBHS, has installed buckets in the stalls
for people to dispose of the paper towels neatly.
Please use them.
:: PXE Net Boot Puppy Linux
Mike and I researched net booting Puppy during the week. They agree we
don't have the right combination of binaries on the Vector Linux "Puppy
server" to net boot.
Any scheme requires DHCPD. So, as Mike continued to research the
available documentation, I attempted to download and install dhcpd on
the Vector Linux "server." The VL official repository and mirrors don't
contain dhcpd, only the client program. So Tom looked at Slackware
mirrors. Many, if not most, of the mirrors are based on ftp which is
blocked by the church's router. HTTP versions of the same mirrors also
failed. So Goose created a public folder on the lab server and
downloaded the dhcpd package. Tom transferred it to the VL server using scp.
The lab is a little closer to net booting Puppy. At least, we have some
of the required binaries in place. We ran out of time before we could
locate, download and install the other binaries.
:: Vector Linux/LTSP Server at Warehouse
Goose plans to install the VL 5.8 server Thursday. Since Dale and I
won't be at the lab, Goose can work relatively undistracted. If Kevin
attends the session, he may be interested looking over Goose's shoulder.
Goose will backup group and individual password files, home directories
and some config files to a USB thumb drive. Then he'll migrate the files
to the new server.
The new VL-LTSP server has hardware RAID. And, it is smaller, faster and
quieter than the old server.
:: Bootable Ghost Image of VL 5.8
Jay was unable to ghost the hard drive I dropped off at his office. It
returned kernel panics and wouldn't boot.
So I selected a PC and a 10 GB drive to do a new VL install. Rick
attached the PC to the KVM. Every VL CD in my kit failed to install! Is
it the CDs? Is it the drive?
I took the CDs, drive and PC home to experiment. Two of the three CDs
work fine at home on the same PC and hard drive. I'll drop off the new
drive at Jay's office Thursday.
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