Network Changes

[Robert Dinse <nanook@eskimo.com>]

     Today I'm picking up 100-base-T cards for eskimo and mail which are
presently directly on the FDDI backbone, and then sometime in the very near
future we will be re-arranging the network to move everything over to switched
100-base-T. 

     I'm going to have to make new cabling for everything because it's all
4-wire 10-base-T now.  I'm not familiar with the pairing on 100-base-T, can
anybody tell me what pins constitute pairs?  In otherwords, with 10-base-T,
pins 1 and 2 are a pair and pins 3 and 6 are a pair, and it's important that
the pairs be correct for any significant length because they are twisted to
reduce radiation of pick up of stray noise and to avoid cross-talk between
pairs. 

     I'm also picking up three machines today, one will be Eskinews's
replacement except I haven't got the disks yet but will have a small drive
initially to put in so that we can get the software compiled, configured, and
tested prior to hanging the spool drives on it and replacing the old machine. 

     Another will be a combination of development machine for now and after
it's adequately secured and configured, a replacement for chat that will be
running Linux instead of SunOS, but hopefully with SunOS emulation so existing
SunOS bot binaries can continue to function.

     A third is going to be a workstation here to allow us to convert things we
use over and eventually get rid of the LX's and IPX's we're using.

     Now that we've got adequate bandwidth, at least with the exception of
unusual peaks, the web server has been stable:

# uptime
 10:32am  up 26 days, 20:45,  1 user,  load average: 2.86, 2.42, 2.24

     And that has been the most difficult application to get stable, so at this
point the plan is to start moving everything else over to these machines but
only getting a few at a time otherwise it would be hardware just sitting here
since it takes a lot of time to get everything ported.

     Having one box publically available running Linux will also serve to allow
a platform on which we can put the modern Java development kit, as opposed to
1.0 which is the only version available for Sun.  As we move things over to the
new machines applications will be upgraded to current versions.