[Cialug] ISU Sale Notes

[cialug@cialug.org]

On Tue, Aug 20, 2002 at 11:44:30AM -0500, Nathan E. Pralle wrote:

[snip]

Very nice summary.

> That's about the gist of it. It's a good time all in all, and you can get 
> in some mighty interesting conversations and meet some great people who are 
> picking over things.

Yup.  Those kids that Ricky (on Friday, before the server was taken down)
was talking about building a cluster using surplus machines?  I was riding
up to the sale, and saw three or four piles of machines, with all these kids
milling around them like honeybees around a hive.

I asked what they were going to do with them.

Build a Linux cluster, they said (might have said Beowulf, might not have).

Oh really, I said.

Yeah, we've already got a few nodes, and we hope to add the rest of these to
it before we're done at the end of the week.

So, what distribution are you running?

Debian.

Woody?

No, sarge.  That's the new unstable.

(At this point, I looked puzzled, because I had just found out woody had
gone stable, and didn't know the name of the unstable release yet.)

and so on and so forth . . . I was just beside myself with delight at what
they were doing, their intelligence and intensity and just general geek
coolness.  It totally made my day.


I tried to get a chance to talk with these kids some more, but didn't have
much luck doing it "through channels".  I knew folks on the lists would be
interested to hear about this sort of thing.

Ricky, if you've got any other cool details about what they did this summer,
dish!

--Joe