News

[Robert Dinse <nanook@eskimo.com>]

     It is 3AM, some idiot has been flooding news with bogus newgroups creating
.....maxwell groups, rather like the hipcrime groups.

     So I aliased the originating site out, reloaded newsfeeds, and proceeded
to create a little script to kill the bogus groups, and whilst that was running
the entire machine locked again, no errors. 

     This has happened a couple of times in the last few days, I fear a CPU
module or SIMM or something is going south.

     It will probably take 3-4 hours to come back up assuming the automatic
fsck is successful, if it is not, another 3-4 hour manual will be required.

     Going to replace the whole news server and have most of the necessary
hardware located, the one exception is drive, drive case/power supplies, and
cabling for drives.

     I'm planning on going with 70GB drives rather than the larger Seagates
for a variety of reasons.  The IBM drives have been more reliable, I want to
spread the I/O out across more spindles, and the power consumption and heat
dissipation of the IBM drives is more reasonable.

     So now I've got to find the best deal I can and buy them, any suggestions
for where to buy these?  The more the merrier.  I will need a total of 16 of
these, plus two eight-drive SCSI cases with 68-pin wiring and power for all of
these drives.  Will need a Micro DB-28 connector on each, and terminator, and
cable.  Each case will connect to a differnet controller so that the spool will
be spread across two controllers.