MyLinux - newdire

New dire is actually an old Compaq Deskpro 2000 M1533 i had lying around. I bought two new IBM Deskstar 180GXP 180Gb Harddrives for newdire, with the intention of running XFS across both of them to create one large fast resilient filesystem.

When I first powered the machine up, it appeared to be under-clocked as it was reporting the cpu as only running at 99Mhz! This turned out to be that someone had been a bit too adventurous with the overclocking settings and had tried to run it at 200MHz! ;) Changing the dip switches solved it...

processor	: 0
vendor_id	: GenuineIntel
cpu family	: 5
model		: 2
model name	: Pentium 75 - 200
stepping	: 12
cpu MHz		: 99.655
fdiv_bug	: no
hlt_bug		: no
f00f_bug	: yes
coma_bug	: no
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 1
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8
bogomips	: 198.65

processor	: 0
vendor_id	: GenuineIntel
cpu family	: 5
model		: 2
model name	: Pentium 75 - 200
stepping	: 12
cpu MHz		: 132.875
fdiv_bug	: no
hlt_bug		: no
f00f_bug	: yes
coma_bug	: no
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 1
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8
bogomips	: 264.60

Here is a copy of a phpSysInfo report on the server.

I chose to install Gentoo for the very first time on this server as RedHat had recently decided to drop public support for its free GNU/Linux distribution and had passed it over to Fedora which I wasn't too impressed about. So far I've been very happy with Gentoo :)

To give you some impression of just how slow this machine is, here's some GCC compile timings for ya:-

newdire root # genlop -t gcc
 * sys-devel/gcc
 
     Thu Sep 11 06:40:48 2003 --> sys-devel/gcc-3.2.3-r1
       merge time: 30 minutes and 42 seconds.
 
     Fri Feb 13 17:41:32 2004 --> sys-devel/gcc-3.3.2-r5
       merge time: 16 hours, 56 minutes, and 10 seconds.
 
     Thu Jun 24 15:19:56 2004 --> sys-devel/gcc-3.3.3-r6
       merge time: 6 hours, 43 minutes, and 30 seconds.
 
  
 merged totally 3 ebuilds in 1 day, 10 minutes, and 22 seconds.
 average merge time: 8 hours, 3 minutes, and 27 seconds.