From webmaster at mn-linux.org Sat Jul 4 13:51:08 2009 From: webmaster at mn-linux.org (TCLUG Classifieds) Date: Sat, 4 Jul 2009 13:51:08 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] New TCLUG Classified Ad Message-ID: <200907041851.n64Ip8v02078@crusader.real-time.com> New TCLUG Classified Ad Category: Computer Type of Ad: For Sale Subject: Media Center PC I'm selling my Media Center PC since I don't use it anymore AMD Athlon X2 4850e 2.5GHz (low power cpu) 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) 500 GB Seagate 7200rpm IDE HDD ASUS M3N78-EMH HDMI AM2+/AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 8200 HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard Small form factor case with 300W PSU Anyware GP-IR02BK Vista 2 channel IR Remote Control with USB IR Receiver 6.56ft HDMI cable NO OPERATING SYSTEM INCLUDED - runs vista great Would make a great workstation or media center! Asking $300 or B.O. andyschmid -at- gmail.com Seller Email address: andyschmid at gmail dot com http://www.mn-linux.org/cgi-bin/classifieds/index.cgi From poptix at poptix.net Mon Jul 6 02:31:03 2009 From: poptix at poptix.net (Matt Hallacy) Date: Mon, 06 Jul 2009 02:31:03 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] suggestions other than General Nanosystems to get a computer In-Reply-To: <4A42D9B6.8010807@bitstream.net> References: <200906181328.24354.tclug@lizakowski.com> <47f4d5e70906181337v72792022v7bb6e91bbab4b505@mail.gmail.com> <4A401169.1020802@ripperd.com> <4A42D9B6.8010807@bitstream.net> Message-ID: <1246865463.5452.7.camel@deepthinker.poptix.net> I'm sure this thread is dead by now, but I'll interject my 2 cents worth. I always appreciated GN simply because it was a place I could walk in, order the parts I need, pay and walk out. If you're looking for mindless drones to direct your purchase you should be at Best Buy, accepting the 3 year PSP and "Geek" Squad 'computer setup' fee. I've never had a problem dealing with GN when it involved defective merchandise (a few hard drives, a few sticks of RAM, and a motherboard over the years). Though I am sad to see that Tran is "gone", they had better pricing on some items and always seemed to have the things GN didn't (and GN always had the things Tran didn't). @GN - feel free to look up my purchase history, you'll see I've purchased well over $20k worth of merchandise there. Keep up the good work, expand your selection. Please for the love of $deity don't turn into a bunch of best buy/microcenter sales droids. On Wed, 2009-06-24 at 20:58 -0500, PJ Crump wrote: > I would like to echo the same type of bad customer service at GN. I > have been there 3 times over the past 5 years and every time I wonder > why I go there to begin with.. One example I had was when I was going > to build a PC and wanted information about the various cases they had in > stock.. Even though there was no one in line I was told to look at the > samples and then when I had a question it was as if I had asked for a > friggin pedicure.. From r_a_wilkinson at yahoo.com Mon Jul 6 12:05:28 2009 From: r_a_wilkinson at yahoo.com (Robert Wilkinson) Date: Mon, 06 Jul 2009 12:05:28 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] suggestions other than General Nanosystems to get a computer Message-ID: <1246899928.8701.7.camel@robert-desktop> I fail to see your point. Are you saying that your positive experiences somehow negate all of the negative experiences of everyone else? From wdtj at yahoo.com Mon Jul 6 12:25:16 2009 From: wdtj at yahoo.com (Wayne Johnson) Date: Mon, 6 Jul 2009 10:25:16 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [tclug-list] suggestions other than General Nanosystems to get a computer In-Reply-To: <1246899928.8701.7.camel@robert-desktop> References: <1246899928.8701.7.camel@robert-desktop> Message-ID: <885563.44189.qm@web53812.mail.re2.yahoo.com> I think he's saying that everyone's expectations are different. If I need a part fast (can't wait for newegg), that's where I go. In my experience they have less of a selection, and are a bit more expensive (YMMV) than newegg, but then I won't have to wait a week to get the part. Now those who come to me, not knowing what a memory stick is, I recommend they go to Micro-center or Best Buy. At least they have people that are a little (again YMMV) knowledgeable. --- Wayne Johnson, | There are two kinds of people: Those 3943 Penn Ave. N. | who say to God, "Thy will be done," Minneapolis, MN 55412-1908 | and those to whom God says, "All right, (612) 522-7003 | then, have it your way." --C.S. Lewis ________________________________ From: Robert Wilkinson To: tclug-list at mn-linux.org Sent: Monday, July 6, 2009 12:05:28 PM Subject: Re: [tclug-list] suggestions other than General Nanosystems to get a computer I fail to see your point. Are you saying that your positive experiences somehow negate all of the negative experiences of everyone else? _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota tclug-list at mn-linux.org http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20090706/cada6f49/attachment.htm From poptix at poptix.net Mon Jul 6 13:05:24 2009 From: poptix at poptix.net (Matt Hallacy) Date: Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:05:24 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] suggestions other than General Nanosystems to get a computer In-Reply-To: <885563.44189.qm@web53812.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <1246899928.8701.7.camel@robert-desktop> <885563.44189.qm@web53812.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1246903524.5452.92.camel@deepthinker.poptix.net> Precisely. Stores like GNS are for the people who know what they're doing and occasionally need compatibility information or a quick bench test of components. While I have certainly seen their employees go the extra mile to assist someone in picking out parts for a system it's really not their specialty and you shouldn't complain when the geeky tech guy sucks at the sales droid lingo. On Mon, 2009-07-06 at 10:25 -0700, Wayne Johnson wrote: > I think he's saying that everyone's expectations are different. If I > need a part fast (can't wait for newegg), that's where I go. In my > experience they have less of a selection, and are a bit more expensive > (YMMV) than newegg, but then I won't have to wait a week to get the > part. > > Now those who come to me, not knowing what a memory stick is, I > recommend they go to Micro-center or Best Buy. At least they have > people that are a little (again YMMV) knowledgeable. From mbmiller+l at gmail.com Mon Jul 6 13:33:11 2009 From: mbmiller+l at gmail.com (Mike Miller) Date: Mon, 6 Jul 2009 13:33:11 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [tclug-list] suggestions other than General Nanosystems to get a computer In-Reply-To: <1246903524.5452.92.camel@deepthinker.poptix.net> References: <1246899928.8701.7.camel@robert-desktop> <885563.44189.qm@web53812.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <1246903524.5452.92.camel@deepthinker.poptix.net> Message-ID: On Mon, 6 Jul 2009, Matt Hallacy wrote: > Precisely. Stores like GNS are for the people who know what they're > doing and occasionally need compatibility information or a quick bench > test of components. While I have certainly seen their employees go the > extra mile to assist someone in picking out parts for a system it's > really not their specialty and you shouldn't complain when the geeky > tech guy sucks at the sales droid lingo. Was someone saying that GNS guys "suck at sales droid lingo?" I missed that one. I wrote that "they can be very arrogant and rude." Was that claim somehow related to your message? I'm pretty sure I've spent $10,000+ at GNS and I've recommended them to other people, but the arrogance of certain staff is a continuing problem for them. It doesn't matter if it's OK with you. I live near to GNS so I continue to shop there. I'm not saying that people shouldn't shop at GNS, but I am saying that the staff can be rude. Sometimes they give bad information. Bad information probably happens everywhere but the rudeness is a little more characteristic of GNS and it is a reason why many people have avoided them. We have heard this repeatedly on this list. At first I defended GNS but why should I defend them? They can do better. Buy the way, how do Micro Center prices compare with GNS prices for things like RAM chips? I live near GNS, but it isn't too unpleasant of a drive to Micro Center, especially if I'm already at Costco. I'll pay more for local than for NewEgg just to be a good neighbor. Mike From r_a_wilkinson at yahoo.com Mon Jul 6 14:20:24 2009 From: r_a_wilkinson at yahoo.com (Robert Wilkinson) Date: Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:20:24 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] suggestions other than General Nanosystems to get a computer Message-ID: <1246908024.8701.53.camel@robert-desktop> If you like Newegg, you will love frys.com! Also check out The Box Shop (local retail stores) for both new and used. I have never been a customer of GNS. I can also say that I don't believe I ever will be because of the negative comments I have seen here. MULTIPLE examples by NUMEROUS people have been given stating dissatisfaction with customer service at GNS. To defend poor customer service by inferring that they are not the right kind of customer; not "... people who know what they're doing ...", is ridiculous. No matter the reason, poor customer service is poor customer service. It's not that hard to figure out. (Dwell on it.) BTW, I usually get my merchandise from Newegg in 3-4 days, not a week. If system up-time is critical to your business, have a backup system standing by! A small price to pay (at Frys.com). ______ Precisely. Stores like GNS are for the people who know what they're doing and occasionally need compatibility information or a quick bench test of components. While I have certainly seen their employees go the extra mile to assist someone in picking out parts for a system it's really not their specialty and you shouldn't complain when the geeky tech guy sucks at the sales droid lingo. On Mon, 2009-07-06 at 10:25 -0700, Wayne Johnson wrote: > I think he's saying that everyone's expectations are different. If I > need a part fast (can't wait for newegg), that's where I go. In my > experience they have less of a selection, and are a bit more expensive > (YMMV) than newegg, but then I won't have to wait a week to get the > part. > > Now those who come to me, not knowing what a memory stick is, I > recommend they go to Micro-center or Best Buy. At least they have > people that are a little (again YMMV) knowledgeable. From bob at grunners.com Mon Jul 6 14:42:35 2009 From: bob at grunners.com (Bob De Mars) Date: Mon, 6 Jul 2009 14:42:35 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] suggestions other than General Nanosystems to get a computer In-Reply-To: <1246908024.8701.53.camel@robert-desktop> References: <1246908024.8701.53.camel@robert-desktop> Message-ID: <2F317768D398A740BC88E65F37FAFB60053EAB1BD4@tardis.LCL.local> > If you like Newegg, you will love frys.com! I used to live in Los Angeles for many years, and there was a Fry's Electronics about a mile from my house. The stores are about the size of a Walmart. All you find inside is parts & more parts & more parts, funny 12 volt things, and a random household item. They would print a multi page ad in the Times each Wed or Thur for the super sales for the coming weekend, and you would wait in line to check out for about 45 minutes. Ahhh.... Miss That. Problem I have now is that no matter where I go I compare it to Fry's, and I always leave sad.... Image isle after of isle of nothing but motherboards...... Thanks for listening, as I have nothing really to add to this conversation.... Bob GlobeRunners, Inc. IT Manager 600 Inwood Ave. N., Suite 160 | Oakdale, MN 55128 | Direct (651) 925-1500 | Cell: (612) 850-6940 | Fax: (651) 925-1560 | Email: bob at grunners.com -----Original Message----- From: tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org [mailto:tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org] On Behalf Of Robert Wilkinson Sent: Monday, July 06, 2009 2:20 PM To: tclug-list at mn-linux.org Subject: Re: [tclug-list] suggestions other than General Nanosystems to get a computer If you like Newegg, you will love frys.com! Also check out The Box Shop (local retail stores) for both new and used. I have never been a customer of GNS. I can also say that I don't believe I ever will be because of the negative comments I have seen here. MULTIPLE examples by NUMEROUS people have been given stating dissatisfaction with customer service at GNS. To defend poor customer service by inferring that they are not the right kind of customer; not "... people who know what they're doing ...", is ridiculous. No matter the reason, poor customer service is poor customer service. It's not that hard to figure out. (Dwell on it.) BTW, I usually get my merchandise from Newegg in 3-4 days, not a week. If system up-time is critical to your business, have a backup system standing by! A small price to pay (at Frys.com). ______ Precisely. Stores like GNS are for the people who know what they're doing and occasionally need compatibility information or a quick bench test of components. While I have certainly seen their employees go the extra mile to assist someone in picking out parts for a system it's really not their specialty and you shouldn't complain when the geeky tech guy sucks at the sales droid lingo. On Mon, 2009-07-06 at 10:25 -0700, Wayne Johnson wrote: > I think he's saying that everyone's expectations are different. If I > need a part fast (can't wait for newegg), that's where I go. In my > experience they have less of a selection, and are a bit more expensive > (YMMV) than newegg, but then I won't have to wait a week to get the > part. > > Now those who come to me, not knowing what a memory stick is, I > recommend they go to Micro-center or Best Buy. At least they have > people that are a little (again YMMV) knowledgeable. _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota tclug-list at mn-linux.org http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list From poptix at poptix.net Mon Jul 6 15:26:07 2009 From: poptix at poptix.net (Matt Hallacy) Date: Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:26:07 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] suggestions other than General Nanosystems to get a computer In-Reply-To: <1246908024.8701.53.camel@robert-desktop> References: <1246908024.8701.53.camel@robert-desktop> Message-ID: <1246911967.5452.102.camel@deepthinker.poptix.net> On Mon, 2009-07-06 at 14:20 -0500, Robert Wilkinson wrote: > If you like Newegg, you will love frys.com! Also check out The Box Shop > (local retail stores) for both new and used. > > I have never been a customer of GNS. I can also say that I don't > believe I ever will be because of the negative comments I have seen > here. > > MULTIPLE examples by NUMEROUS people have been given stating > dissatisfaction with customer service at GNS. To defend poor customer > service by inferring that they are not the right kind of customer; not > "... people who know what they're doing ...", is ridiculous. > > No matter the reason, poor customer service is poor customer service. > It's not that hard to figure out. (Dwell on it.) Sorry, I don't consider it poor customer service when the auto parts store clerk can't tell me how to replace a part on my car. I also don't consider it poor customer service when the clerk at Wal-Mart doesn't know what kind of drywall anchors would be best for my wall. If you need parts, go to a parts store. If you need professional assistance, go somewhere that specializes in it. GNS is a parts store. From drue at therub.org Mon Jul 6 15:45:39 2009 From: drue at therub.org (Dan Rue) Date: Mon, 6 Jul 2009 15:45:39 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] suggestions other than General Nanosystems to get a computer In-Reply-To: <1246911967.5452.102.camel@deepthinker.poptix.net> References: <1246908024.8701.53.camel@robert-desktop> <1246911967.5452.102.camel@deepthinker.poptix.net> Message-ID: <20090706204539.GG3432@therub.org> On Mon, Jul 06, 2009 at 03:26:07PM -0500, Matt Hallacy wrote: > I also don't > consider it poor customer service when the clerk at Wal-Mart doesn't > know what kind of drywall anchors would be best for my wall. But it is if you're at a hardware store. I haven't shopped at GNS in years, but I used to go there quite a bit, and always had decent experiences. One evening about 4 years ago the motherboard went out during a reboot on an old deprecated production box (words you never want to hear together). Out of options, I sped over to GNS and got there 5 minutes before close. I asked for a "intel server motherboard bundle", and was very uncomfortable buying such hardware without research or foresight. I ended up with this super colorful desktop gaming board (no doubt their most expensive board) with 5.1 digital audio and no vga even. Luckily I did have an old video card laying around. The moral of the story? 1) Don't run production stuff on old deprecated hardware (I'm told this box still breathes, many many years past its prime.. but sometimes this is reality) 2) Don't drive all brick & mortar business out, because occasionally, they can save your ass. Even if it is with ridiculous, over priced, Gold Plated super hyper speed platinum gamer hardware. Incidentally, I always enjoyed how GNS *doesn't* kill you on cables. In fact, at one point, i just needed some power cables. They were like $12 at the evil blue store, and even >$10 at micro center. GNS *GAVE THEM TO ME*. I didn't even purchase anything else that day. drue From justin.kremer at gmail.com Mon Jul 6 15:48:41 2009 From: justin.kremer at gmail.com (Justin Kremer) Date: Mon, 6 Jul 2009 15:48:41 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] suggestions other than General Nanosystems to get a computer In-Reply-To: <1246911967.5452.102.camel@deepthinker.poptix.net> References: <1246908024.8701.53.camel@robert-desktop> <1246911967.5452.102.camel@deepthinker.poptix.net> Message-ID: <27e6356a0907061348r34717c32xf8a2d557e2182a7b@mail.gmail.com> On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 3:26 PM, Matt Hallacy wrote: >> No matter the reason, poor customer service is poor customer service. >> It's not that hard to figure out. (Dwell on it.) > > Sorry, I don't consider it poor customer service when the auto parts > store clerk can't tell me how to replace a part on my car. I also don't > consider it poor customer service when the clerk at Wal-Mart doesn't > know what kind of drywall anchors would be best for my wall. > > If you need parts, go to a parts store. If you need professional > assistance, go somewhere that specializes in it. GNS is a parts store. And if you want to extend that a bit further, I DO consider it poor customer service when the store clerk at the parts store tries to sell me a part that's clearly way more expensive than what I need, and then badgers me to buy a replacement plan or extended warranty. I've had those problems repeatedly at Microcenter. (never at GNS) Their salesmen are worse than most used car salesmen I've dealt with. I can't understand why anyone would recommend sending someone who doesn't know computers to Microcenter. I do shop there, but I know what I'm looking for, and I know how to say, "No, I don't need or want that. Please help me to purchase exactly what I'm looking for, and nothing else, or I will not buy anything from you." (all too often, the item I'm looking for is locked in a display case, or in the back room, and slight variations on that theme work very well) - Justin From r_a_wilkinson at yahoo.com Mon Jul 6 16:13:58 2009 From: r_a_wilkinson at yahoo.com (Robert Wilkinson) Date: Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:13:58 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] suggestions other than General Nanosystems to get a computer In-Reply-To: <1246911967.5452.102.camel@deepthinker.poptix.net> References: <1246908024.8701.53.camel@robert-desktop> <1246911967.5452.102.camel@deepthinker.poptix.net> Message-ID: <1246914838.8701.81.camel@robert-desktop> I will go to a parts store because I don't need help/advice/et cetera, but I won't go to GNS! I look for a place with service, quality, selection and price. If a store doesn't provide those things they need to put up with complaints. It's that simple. Remember, I have never had a bad experience there and I have no complaints about them. But the reputation prevents me from buying there and I'm sure that I'm not the only one. Again, your good experiences DO NOT negate others bad experiences, and a little help now and then for the novice can make a business grow while your "it's not my job" attitude can eventually destroy a business. On Mon, 2009-07-06 at 15:26 -0500, Matt Hallacy wrote: > Sorry, I don't consider it poor customer service when the auto parts > store clerk can't tell me how to replace a part on my car. I also > don't > consider it poor customer service when the clerk at Wal-Mart doesn't > know what kind of drywall anchors would be best for my wall. > > If you need parts, go to a parts store. If you need professional > assistance, go somewhere that specializes in it. GNS is a parts > store. From scott at dier.name Mon Jul 6 16:11:00 2009 From: scott at dier.name (Scott Dier) Date: Mon, 6 Jul 2009 16:11:00 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] suggestions other than General Nanosystems to get a computer In-Reply-To: <27e6356a0907061348r34717c32xf8a2d557e2182a7b@mail.gmail.com> References: <1246908024.8701.53.camel@robert-desktop> <1246911967.5452.102.camel@deepthinker.poptix.net> <27e6356a0907061348r34717c32xf8a2d557e2182a7b@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <51d20ae60907061411r324e210dlf202a708dac7c964@mail.gmail.com> On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 3:48 PM, Justin Kremer wrote: > And if you want to extend that a bit further, I DO consider it poor > customer service when the store clerk at the parts store tries to sell This is an artifact of the pay situation at Microcenter. Most of the sales staff is paid on commission and given low base wages. If they are not selling extra product, service plans, etc they make far less than an entry level job at other typical hourly retail firms. This is exactly why Circuit City got rid of their commissions -- some people refused to go there after bad experiences of a sales guy trying to put food on the table due to poor wage policy. Salespeople at Microcenter are not to blame for these tactics, the management (and moreso the management that isn't local) is to blame. On the other hand, I have no idea how GNS employees get paid. -- Scott Dier From cncole at earthlink.net Mon Jul 6 16:30:11 2009 From: cncole at earthlink.net (Chuck Cole) Date: Mon, 6 Jul 2009 16:30:11 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] suggestions other than General Nanosystemsto get a computer In-Reply-To: <2F317768D398A740BC88E65F37FAFB60053EAB1BD4@tardis.LCL.local> Message-ID: > -----Original Message----- > From: tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org > [mailto:tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org]On Behalf Of Bob De Mars > Sent: Monday, July 06, 2009 2:43 PM > > I used to live in Los Angeles for many years, and there was a Fry's Electronics about a mile from my house. The stores > are about the size of a Walmart. All you find inside is parts & more parts & more parts, funny 12 volt things, and a > random household item. They would print a multi page ad in the Times each Wed or Thur for the super sales for the coming > weekend, and you would wait in line to check out for about 45 minutes. Ahhh.... Miss That. > > Problem I have now is that no matter where I go I compare it to Fry's, and I always leave sad.... > > Image isle after of isle of nothing but motherboards...... > > Thanks for listening, as I have nothing really to add to this conversation.... > > Bob Gotta agree! I always visit Fry's when in San Jose on business. Great for stereo stuff also. Busy, but decent service. Chuck From mbmiller+l at gmail.com Tue Jul 7 09:29:41 2009 From: mbmiller+l at gmail.com (Mike Miller) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 09:29:41 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [tclug-list] cheapest "farm"? Message-ID: We want to put together a few computers to make a little "farm" for doing our statistical analyses. It would be good to have 50-100 cores. What is the cheapest way to go? About 4GB RAM per core should be more than enough. I'm thinking quad-core chips are going to be cheaper. How many sockets per mobo? I guess 1-, 2- and 4-socket mobos are available. We don't need SMP, but we'll take it if it is cheap (which I doubt). We'll use cloned HDDs in these boxes. My first thought is "blade" but maybe blades are more expensive than somewhat less convenient ways of housing the mobos. We have people here to house it and manage it and to pay for electricity(!). They also will have ideas about what we should buy. Any ideas? Which CPU gives the most flops/dollar these days? Mike From andyschmid at gmail.com Tue Jul 7 09:49:11 2009 From: andyschmid at gmail.com (Andy Schmid) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 09:49:11 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] cheapest "farm"? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <7b7c42a30907070749m39ae1c48h7cf76143136dfaf6@mail.gmail.com> Not sure if this will work for your computing needs, but take a look at the NVIDIA Tesla coprocessor. http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_computing_solutions.html Basically, its 240 processor cores on a single PCIe board. Great for highly parallel computation. Also, its cheap.. around $1500 or so. On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 9:29 AM, Mike Miller > wrote: > We want to put together a few computers to make a little "farm" for doing > our statistical analyses. It would be good to have 50-100 cores. What is > the cheapest way to go? About 4GB RAM per core should be more than > enough. I'm thinking quad-core chips are going to be cheaper. How many > sockets per mobo? I guess 1-, 2- and 4-socket mobos are available. We > don't need SMP, but we'll take it if it is cheap (which I doubt). We'll > use cloned HDDs in these boxes. My first thought is "blade" but maybe > blades are more expensive than somewhat less convenient ways of housing > the mobos. > > We have people here to house it and manage it and to pay for > electricity(!). They also will have ideas about what we should buy. > > Any ideas? > > Which CPU gives the most flops/dollar these days? > > Mike > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20090707/b2b61605/attachment.htm From sulrich at botwerks.org Tue Jul 7 10:09:33 2009 From: sulrich at botwerks.org (steve ulrich) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 10:09:33 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] cheapest "farm"? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: mike - building out your own compute infrastructure is so 2002. ;) i've used amazon EC2 for a very similar application where i've been running large simulations on their infrastructure with my own VM image that i use for my purposes. you can simply dial up the number of processors that you purchase and use. you're charged by the hour for the the number of CPU instances you use. instead of buying hardware yourself that you have to power up, replace HDDs, etc. for and manage connectivity for you let someone pay for that and simply use their resources on demand. On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 9:29 AM, Mike Miller wrote: > We want to put together a few computers to make a little "farm" for doing > our statistical analyses. ?It would be good to have 50-100 cores. ?What is > the cheapest way to go? ?About 4GB RAM per core should be more than > enough. ?I'm thinking quad-core chips are going to be cheaper. ?How many > sockets per mobo? I guess 1-, 2- and 4-socket mobos are available. ?We > don't need SMP, but we'll take it if it is cheap (which I doubt). ?We'll > use cloned HDDs in these boxes. My first thought is "blade" but maybe > blades are more expensive than somewhat less convenient ways of housing > the mobos. > > We have people here to house it and manage it and to pay for > electricity(!). They also will have ideas about what we should buy. > > Any ideas? > > Which CPU gives the most flops/dollar these days? > > Mike > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -- steve ulrich (sulrich at botwerks.*) From trnja001 at umn.edu Tue Jul 7 12:15:04 2009 From: trnja001 at umn.edu (Elvedin Trnjanin) Date: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:15:04 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] cheapest "farm"? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4A538298.5040100@umn.edu> I've spent a lot of time working with EC2 and I would not really recommend it for this purpose without putting a lot of effort into planning and considering all the options. First of all, EC2 can be more expensive than purchasing your own hardware unless you do it right. There are two billing types of Amazon Machine Image (AMI) instances; on demand and reserved. On demand instances are intended to be up for the short term - from a few hours to days. Their pricing per hour reflects this. Reserved instances are cheaper to run per hour (3 cents compared to 10 cents for certain instances) since you pay a chunk of money up front. Throwing your infrastructure in the cloud is not always cost effective unless you plan it correctly. (There are companies that do this - I work for one) Keep in mind that after a year or two of hardcore EC2 usage, you might have spent enough to have purchased your own cluster; all expenses after that point is wasted money. The other issues are designing your infrastructure over non-persistent storage. You might need to set up your own AMIs to ease some of the initial configuration (application installation and cluster management software). While you can use the many gigabytes EC2 instances come with for scratch space, you will need a combination of Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Block Storage (EBS) for persistent storage. Each of these services has their own limitations. S3 can store an unlimited amount of files but maximum file size is around 5GB. An EBS volume can only be mounted by one instance at a time (for now). An EBS volume is also only available to EC2 instances in the same availability zone. You can think of availability zones as data centers in the same geographic region (although this isn't necessarily correct). While data transfers are free between EC2 instances (over local IP addresses), they are not when your are using the public IP, even if it is between EC2 instances as I've heard. If you're transferring gigabytes or even terabytes of data to be computed or resulting from computation, this can be an expensive and slow process. Amazon provides a service (AWS Import/Export) where you can send in storage devices and they'll copy the data over to S3. If you have a lot of devices, it can be very expensive. Amazon does provide a nice and simple calculator for this - http://awsimportexport.s3.amazonaws.com/aws-import-export-calculator.html - so that you can pick which option works best. They also have another calculator for their other services like EC2 and S3 - http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html The biggest flaw with EC2 is that while you do have guaranteed CPU and memory resources, there is no guarantee of memory bandwidth. This means if there is a separate instance from a different AWS account sharing the same physical machine as your compute job, the other instance could be taking up all or most of the memory bandwidth thus making your job run slower. Not only does your job take longer to finish, it is actually more expensive. Since the infrastructure for power, space, and cooling already exists for you, it might be a better route to go with purchasing your own hardware. The biggest issue I see with deciding how many cores to put in a system is the network architecture you choose to purchase. If you choose to go with gigabit Ethernet, it doesn't make a huge difference. If you're thinking of using high speed interconnects like Infiniband, the number of systems you have is crucial since the switches and adapters can cost quite a bit of money. While a 24 port switch can be reasonably cheap (around $5000), a 48 port switches may not be ($20k-50k - http://www.provantage.com/scripts/search.dll?QUERY=Infiniband+switch ) so you would need to buy multiple smaller switches to get the right number of ports, and then add the right amount of switches to that so you can have good enough bisection bandwidth. For the current Intel Xeon (non-Nehalem) processors, you shouldn't really get more than 8 cores in the system as if you go over that count, there isn't enough memory bandwidth to keep them all well fed with work. Dell and sometimes Sun offer good deals to academic groups, so you might benefit from that. Both companies also offer free trials of hardware so you can benchmark your applications on each and pick which is best. While you could get more AMD nodes that have same or equal power for about the same price of a single Intel node, keep in mind the costs of having many less powerful systems opposed to few very powerful ones can be a financial hit in the future. steve ulrich wrote: > mike - > > building out your own compute infrastructure is so 2002. ;) > > i've used amazon EC2 for a very similar application where i've been > running large simulations on their infrastructure with my own VM image > that i use for my purposes. you can simply dial up the number of > processors that you purchase and use. you're charged by the hour for > the the number of CPU instances you use. > > instead of buying hardware yourself that you have to power up, replace > HDDs, etc. for and manage connectivity for you let someone pay for > that and simply use their resources on demand. > > On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 9:29 AM, Mike Miller wrote: > >> We want to put together a few computers to make a little "farm" for doing >> our statistical analyses. It would be good to have 50-100 cores. What is >> the cheapest way to go? About 4GB RAM per core should be more than >> enough. I'm thinking quad-core chips are going to be cheaper. How many >> sockets per mobo? I guess 1-, 2- and 4-socket mobos are available. We >> don't need SMP, but we'll take it if it is cheap (which I doubt). We'll >> use cloned HDDs in these boxes. My first thought is "blade" but maybe >> blades are more expensive than somewhat less convenient ways of housing >> the mobos. >> >> We have people here to house it and manage it and to pay for >> electricity(!). They also will have ideas about what we should buy. >> >> Any ideas? >> >> Which CPU gives the most flops/dollar these days? >> >> Mike >> >> _______________________________________________ >> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >> tclug-list at mn-linux.org >> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >> >> > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20090707/753b6639/attachment.htm From chrome at real-time.com Tue Jul 7 12:33:15 2009 From: chrome at real-time.com (Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 12:33:15 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] cheapest "farm"? In-Reply-To: <4A538298.5040100@umn.edu>; from trnja001@umn.edu on Tue, Jul 07, 2009 at 12:15:04PM -0500 References: <4A538298.5040100@umn.edu> Message-ID: <20090707123315.D24645@real-time.com> Another thing to consider when buying 'cloud computing' is data ownership. If your data is on someone else's machine, do you really own it? Posession *is* 9/10ths of the law after all. If your data isn't really sensitive, and is easily replicable, then this isn't much of a concern. If you have some valuable/sensitive data, you should keep your property rights and security in mind. There may be some clauses buried in the agreements which make data ownership less clear-cut than you might like. -- Carl Soderstrom Systems Administrator Real-Time Enterprises www.real-time.com From mbmiller+l at gmail.com Tue Jul 7 12:38:09 2009 From: mbmiller+l at gmail.com (Mike Miller) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 12:38:09 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [tclug-list] cheapest "farm"? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, a friend wrote: > ----- "Mike Miller" wrote: > > > We don't need SMP, but we'll take it if it is cheap (which I doubt). > > What do you mean by SMP? I usually think of it as Symmetric > Multi-Processing which is required for a multi core or multi processor > system and is available in the linux kernel. > > Given we've had hyper-threaded or dual core processors as standard on > the desktop for a number of years, I'd imagine most distros have SMP > enabled by default, or at least enable it as a result of hardware > detection. I do remember in the good old days requiring a kernel > recompile and setting the SMP flag. > > Did you mean something else by SMP? I think I was using that term inappropriately. What I meant was that I don't need to run multithreaded applications and so I don't need a system that allows for that. I think SMP is not what I was thinking it was and I guess I do need SMP and probably couldn't avoid it if I didn't want it! Mike From mbmiller+l at gmail.com Tue Jul 7 12:42:13 2009 From: mbmiller+l at gmail.com (Mike Miller) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 12:42:13 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [tclug-list] cheapest "farm"? In-Reply-To: <7b7c42a30907070749m39ae1c48h7cf76143136dfaf6@mail.gmail.com> References: <7b7c42a30907070749m39ae1c48h7cf76143136dfaf6@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, Andy Schmid wrote: > Not sure if this will work for your computing needs, but take a look at the > NVIDIA Tesla coprocessor. > > http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_computing_solutions.html > > Basically, its 240 processor cores on a single PCIe board. Great for > highly parallel computation. Also, its cheap.. around $1500 or so. That's an interesting option. The tricky thing will be to get code that can use that computing power -- it would require changing the way I do my work. That isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it is a very interesting prospect. Thanks. Mike From mbmiller+l at gmail.com Tue Jul 7 12:45:55 2009 From: mbmiller+l at gmail.com (Mike Miller) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 12:45:55 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [tclug-list] cheapest "farm"? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, steve ulrich wrote: > mike - > > building out your own compute infrastructure is so 2002. ;) > > i've used amazon EC2 for a very similar application where i've been > running large simulations on their infrastructure with my own VM image > that i use for my purposes. you can simply dial up the number of > processors that you purchase and use. you're charged by the hour for > the the number of CPU instances you use. > > instead of buying hardware yourself that you have to power up, replace > HDDs, etc. for and manage connectivity for you let someone pay for that > and simply use their resources on demand. Once we get things going, we'll probably be using all (80 or so) cores 24/7 for months on end. I assume the costs for Amazon EC2 would eventually surpass our initial hardware costs ($25,000). Regarding power and management troubles -- someone else is doing that and we don't have to pay them. I guess it is paid, in theory, by indirect cost money from our grants to the college. Mike From wdtj at yahoo.com Tue Jul 7 12:57:45 2009 From: wdtj at yahoo.com (Wayne Johnson) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 10:57:45 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [tclug-list] farms for stress testing (was: Re: cheapest "farm"?) In-Reply-To: <4A538298.5040100@umn.edu> References: <4A538298.5040100@umn.edu> Message-ID: <573448.32145.qm@web53811.mail.re2.yahoo.com> We have a need to stress test our product. We have a few multi core machines to run as a DB server and App server but they are pretty heavily used and hiding under a desk. Now the question. Would it be reasonable to try and run stress testing on EC2 (or other) farms? Since we only will need them occasionally, but beat them to death when we do? Would it be cost effective to run this on a farm? If there is no control over how much memory bandwidth you get, you may not be able to get a consistent load. Is there a similar issue with disk I/O? --- Wayne Johnson, | There are two kinds of people: Those 3943 Penn Ave. N. | who say to God, "Thy will be done," Minneapolis, MN 55412-1908 | and those to whom God says, "All right, (612) 522-7003 | then, have it your way." --C.S. Lewis ________________________________ From: Elvedin Trnjanin To: steve ulrich Cc: Mike Miller ; TCLUG List Sent: Tuesday, July 7, 2009 12:15:04 PM Subject: Re: [tclug-list] cheapest "farm"? I've spent a lot of time working with EC2 and I would not really recommend it for this purpose without putting a lot of effort into planning and considering all the options. First of all, EC2 can be more expensive than purchasing your own hardware unless you do it right. There are two billing types of Amazon Machine Image (AMI) instances; on demand and reserved. On demand instances are intended to be up for the short term - from a few hours to days. Their pricing per hour reflects this. Reserved instances are cheaper to run per hour (3 cents compared to 10 cents for certain instances) since you pay a chunk of money up front. Throwing your infrastructure in the cloud is not always cost effective unless you plan it correctly. (There are companies that do this - I work for one) Keep in mind that after a year or two of hardcore EC2 usage, you might have spent enough to have purchased your own cluster; all expenses after that point is wasted money. The other issues are designing your infrastructure over non-persistent storage. You might need to set up your own AMIs to ease some of the initial configuration (application installation and cluster management software). While you can use the many gigabytes EC2 instances come with for scratch space, you will need a combination of Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Block Storage (EBS) for persistent storage. Each of these services has their own limitations. S3 can store an unlimited amount of files but maximum file size is around 5GB. An EBS volume can only be mounted by one instance at a time (for now). An EBS volume is also only available to EC2 instances in the same availability zone. You can think of availability zones as data centers in the same geographic region (although this isn't necessarily correct). While data transfers are free between EC2 instances (over local IP addresses), they are not when your are using the public IP, even if it is between EC2 instances as I've heard. If you're transferring gigabytes or even terabytes of data to be computed or resulting from computation, this can be an expensive and slow process. Amazon provides a service (AWS Import/Export) where you can send in storage devices and they'll copy the data over to S3. If you have a lot of devices, it can be very expensive. Amazon does provide a nice and simple calculator for this - http://awsimportexport.s3.amazonaws.com/aws-import-export-calculator.html - so that you can pick which option works best. They also have another calculator for their other services like EC2 and S3 - http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html The biggest flaw with EC2 is that while you do have guaranteed CPU and memory resources, there is no guarantee of memory bandwidth. This means if there is a separate instance from a different AWS account sharing the same physical machine as your compute job, the other instance could be taking up all or most of the memory bandwidth thus making your job run slower. Not only does your job take longer to finish, it is actually more expensive. Since the infrastructure for power, space, and cooling already exists for you, it might be a better route to go with purchasing your own hardware. The biggest issue I see with deciding how many cores to put in a system is the network architecture you choose to purchase. If you choose to go with gigabit Ethernet, it doesn't make a huge difference. If you're thinking of using high speed interconnects like Infiniband, the number of systems you have is crucial since the switches and adapters can cost quite a bit of money. While a 24 port switch can be reasonably cheap (around $5000), a 48 port switches may not be ($20k-50k - http://www.provantage.com/scripts/search.dll?QUERY=Infiniband+switch ) so you would need to buy multiple smaller switches to get the right number of ports, and then add the right amount of switches to that so you can have good enough bisection bandwidth. For the current Intel Xeon (non-Nehalem) processors, you shouldn't really get more than 8 cores in the system as if you go over that count, there isn't enough memory bandwidth to keep them all well fed with work. Dell and sometimes Sun offer good deals to academic groups, so you might benefit from that. Both companies also offer free trials of hardware so you can benchmark your applications on each and pick which is best. While you could get more AMD nodes that have same or equal power for about the same price of a single Intel node, keep in mind the costs of having many less powerful systems opposed to few very powerful ones can be a financial hit in the future. steve ulrich wrote: mike - > >building out your own compute infrastructure is so 2002. ;) > >i've used amazon EC2 for a very similar application where i've been >running large simulations on their infrastructure with my own VM image >that i use for my purposes. you can simply dial up the number of >processors that you purchase and use. you're charged by the hour for >the the number of CPU instances you use. > >instead of buying hardware yourself that you have to power up, replace >HDDs, etc. for and manage connectivity for you let someone pay for >that and simply use their resources on demand. > >On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 9:29 AM, Mike Miller wrote: > >We want to put together a few computers to make a little "farm" for doing >>our statistical analyses. It would be good to have 50-100 cores. What is >>the cheapest way to go? About 4GB RAM per core should be more than >>enough. I'm thinking quad-core chips are going to be cheaper. How many >>sockets per mobo? I guess 1-, 2- and 4-socket mobos are available. We >>don't need SMP, but we'll take it if it is cheap (which I doubt). We'll >>use cloned HDDs in these boxes. My first thought is "blade" but maybe >>blades are more expensive than somewhat less convenient ways of housing >>the mobos. >> >>We have people here to house it and manage it and to pay for >>electricity(!). They also will have ideas about what we should buy. >> >>Any ideas? >> >>Which CPU gives the most flops/dollar these days? >> >>Mike >> >>_______________________________________________ >>TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >>tclug-list at mn-linux.orghttp://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20090707/9cc9686d/attachment-0001.htm From trnja001 at umn.edu Tue Jul 7 13:05:27 2009 From: trnja001 at umn.edu (Elvedin Trnjanin) Date: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:05:27 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] farms for stress testing In-Reply-To: <573448.32145.qm@web53811.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <4A538298.5040100@umn.edu> <573448.32145.qm@web53811.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <4A538E67.2020607@umn.edu> This is a perfect use of EC2. Memory bandwidth in my tests has been pretty stable most of the time but you might get unlucky once in a while. You can do multiple tests and then come up with your conclusion. If you keep the traffic within EC2, all you're paying for EC2 compute time (even up for a minute is billed as an hour) which means you can get high CPU count instances that match your real systems. For disk I/O, the initial reads are slow (40 MB/s) but after that, my disk I/O benchmark results have a range between 150 to 220 MB/s. Wayne Johnson wrote: > We have a need to stress test our product. We have a few multi core > machines to run as a DB server and App server but they are pretty > heavily used and hiding under a desk. > > Now the question. Would it be reasonable to try and run stress > testing on EC2 (or other) farms? Since we only will need them > occasionally, but beat them to death when we do? Would it be cost > effective to run this on a farm? If there is no control over how much > memory bandwidth you get, you may not be able to get a consistent > load. Is there a similar issue with disk I/O? > > > > --- > Wayne Johnson, | There are two kinds of people: Those > 3943 Penn Ave. N. | who say to God, "Thy will be done," > Minneapolis, MN 55412-1908 | and those to whom God says, "All right, > (612) 522-7003 | then, have it your way." --C.S. Lewis > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > *From:* Elvedin Trnjanin > *To:* steve ulrich > *Cc:* Mike Miller ; TCLUG List > > *Sent:* Tuesday, July 7, 2009 12:15:04 PM > *Subject:* Re: [tclug-list] cheapest "farm"? > > I've spent a lot of time working with EC2 and I would not really > recommend it for this purpose without putting a lot of effort into > planning and considering all the options. First of all, EC2 can be > more expensive than purchasing your own hardware unless you do it > right. There are two billing types of Amazon Machine Image (AMI) > instances; on demand and reserved. On demand instances are intended to > be up for the short term - from a few hours to days. Their pricing per > hour reflects this. Reserved instances are cheaper to run per hour (3 > cents compared to 10 cents for certain instances) since you pay a > chunk of money up front. Throwing your infrastructure in the cloud is > not always cost effective unless you plan it correctly. (There are > companies that do this - I work for one) Keep in mind that after a > year or two of hardcore EC2 usage, you might have spent enough to have > purchased your own cluster; all expenses after that point is wasted > money. > > The other issues are designing your infrastructure over non-persistent > storage. You might need to set up your own AMIs to ease some of the > initial configuration (application installation and cluster management > software). While you can use the many gigabytes EC2 instances come > with for scratch space, you will need a combination of Simple Storage > Service (S3) and Elastic Block Storage (EBS) for persistent storage. > Each of these services has their own limitations. S3 can store an > unlimited amount of files but maximum file size is around 5GB. An EBS > volume can only be mounted by one instance at a time (for now). An EBS > volume is also only available to EC2 instances in the same > availability zone. You can think of availability zones as data centers > in the same geographic region (although this isn't necessarily correct). > > While data transfers are free between EC2 instances (over local IP > addresses), they are not when your are using the public IP, even if it > is between EC2 instances as I've heard. If you're transferring > gigabytes or even terabytes of data to be computed or resulting from > computation, this can be an expensive and slow process. Amazon > provides a service (AWS Import/Export) where you can send in storage > devices and they'll copy the data over to S3. If you have a lot of > devices, it can be very expensive. Amazon does provide a nice and > simple calculator for this - > http://awsimportexport.s3.amazonaws.com/aws-import-export-calculator.html > - so that you can pick which option works best. > > They also have another calculator for their other services like EC2 > and S3 - http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html > > The biggest flaw with EC2 is that while you do have guaranteed CPU and > memory resources, there is no guarantee of memory bandwidth. This > means if there is a separate instance from a different AWS account > sharing the same physical machine as your compute job, the other > instance could be taking up all or most of the memory bandwidth thus > making your job run slower. Not only does your job take longer to > finish, it is actually more expensive. > > Since the infrastructure for power, space, and cooling already exists > for you, it might be a better route to go with purchasing your own > hardware. The biggest issue I see with deciding how many cores to put > in a system is the network architecture you choose to purchase. If you > choose to go with gigabit Ethernet, it doesn't make a huge difference. > If you're thinking of using high speed interconnects like Infiniband, > the number of systems you have is crucial since the switches and > adapters can cost quite a bit of money. While a 24 port switch can be > reasonably cheap (around $5000), a 48 port switches may not be > ($20k-50k - > http://www.provantage.com/scripts/search.dll?QUERY=Infiniband+switch ) > so you would need to buy multiple smaller switches to get the right > number of ports, and then add the right amount of switches to that so > you can have good enough bisection bandwidth. > > For the current Intel Xeon (non-Nehalem) processors, you shouldn't > really get more than 8 cores in the system as if you go over that > count, there isn't enough memory bandwidth to keep them all well fed > with work. Dell and sometimes Sun offer good deals to academic groups, > so you might benefit from that. Both companies also offer free trials > of hardware so you can benchmark your applications on each and pick > which is best. While you could get more AMD nodes that have same or > equal power for about the same price of a single Intel node, keep in > mind the costs of having many less powerful systems opposed to few > very powerful ones can be a financial hit in the future. > > steve ulrich wrote: >> mike - >> >> building out your own compute infrastructure is so 2002. ;) >> >> i've used amazon EC2 for a very similar application where i've been >> running large simulations on their infrastructure with my own VM image >> that i use for my purposes. you can simply dial up the number of >> processors that you purchase and use. you're charged by the hour for >> the the number of CPU instances you use. >> >> instead of buying hardware yourself that you have to power up, replace >> HDDs, etc. for and manage connectivity for you let someone pay for >> that and simply use their resources on demand. >> >> On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 9:29 AM, Mike Miller wrote: >> >>> We want to put together a few computers to make a little "farm" for doing >>> our statistical analyses. It would be good to have 50-100 cores. What is >>> the cheapest way to go? About 4GB RAM per core should be more than >>> enough. I'm thinking quad-core chips are going to be cheaper. How many >>> sockets per mobo? I guess 1-, 2- and 4-socket mobos are available. We >>> don't need SMP, but we'll take it if it is cheap (which I doubt). We'll >>> use cloned HDDs in these boxes. My first thought is "blade" but maybe >>> blades are more expensive than somewhat less convenient ways of housing >>> the mobos. >>> >>> We have people here to house it and manage it and to pay for >>> electricity(!). They also will have ideas about what we should buy. >>> >>> Any ideas? >>> >>> Which CPU gives the most flops/dollar these days? >>> >>> Mike >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> TCLUG Mailing List - >>> Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >>> tclug-list at mn-linux.org >>> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >>> >>> >> > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20090707/cd2a7550/attachment.htm From sulrich at botwerks.org Tue Jul 7 13:19:21 2009 From: sulrich at botwerks.org (steve ulrich) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 13:19:21 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] cheapest "farm"? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: mike - my comments were a bit tongue in cheek. if you're running this constantly you're typically much better off building out your own compute infrastructure. i would be remiss if i didn't point out that there are a lot of folks doing this themselves and a host of folks in this market segment. if you don't have the need to run large simulations on an ongoing basis, then utility compute resources like EC2 are a great way to go and amazon is by no means the only game in town on that, they've just made the process of setup and billing dead easy. On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 12:45 PM, Mike Miller wrote: > On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, steve ulrich wrote: > >> mike - >> >> building out your own compute infrastructure is so 2002. ;) >> >> i've used amazon EC2 for a very similar application where i've been >> running large simulations on their infrastructure with my own VM image that >> i use for my purposes. ?you can simply dial up the number of processors that >> you purchase and use. ?you're charged by the hour for the the number of CPU >> instances you use. >> >> instead of buying hardware yourself that you have to power up, replace >> HDDs, etc. for and manage connectivity for you let someone pay for that and >> simply use their resources on demand. > > > Once we get things going, we'll probably be using all (80 or so) cores 24/7 > for months on end. ?I assume the costs for Amazon EC2 would eventually > surpass our initial hardware costs ($25,000). > > Regarding power and management troubles -- someone else is doing that and we > don't have to pay them. ?I guess it is paid, in theory, by indirect cost > money from our grants to the college. > > Mike > -- steve ulrich (sulrich at botwerks.*) From mbmiller+l at gmail.com Tue Jul 7 13:31:40 2009 From: mbmiller+l at gmail.com (Mike Miller) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 13:31:40 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [tclug-list] cheapest "farm"? In-Reply-To: <20090707123315.D24645@real-time.com> References: <4A538298.5040100@umn.edu> <20090707123315.D24645@real-time.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote: > Another thing to consider when buying 'cloud computing' is data > ownership. If your data is on someone else's machine, do you really own > it? Posession *is* 9/10ths of the law after all. > > If your data isn't really sensitive, and is easily replicable, then this > isn't much of a concern. If you have some valuable/sensitive data, you > should keep your property rights and security in mind. There may be some > clauses buried in the agreements which make data ownership less > clear-cut than you might like. There would not be obvious identifying information in the data (e.g., names, addresses, phone numbers, SS#s), but the genotype data are unique to an individual and could theoretically be used to identify other data (e.g., disease status) for someone whose genotypes are available through some other source. We can't put the data out there "in the cloud," I don't think. Mike From josh at tcbug.org Tue Jul 7 13:27:14 2009 From: josh at tcbug.org (Josh Paetzel) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 13:27:14 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] farms for stress testing (was: Re: cheapest "farm"?) In-Reply-To: <573448.32145.qm@web53811.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <4A538298.5040100@umn.edu> <573448.32145.qm@web53811.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <5823FA26-1A1D-4528-B542-A66C4CAF231C@tcbug.org> On Jul 7, 2009, at 12:57 PM, Wayne Johnson wrote: > We have a need to stress test our product. We have a few multi core > machines to run as a DB server and App server but they are pretty > heavily used and hiding under a desk. > > Now the question. Would it be reasonable to try and run stress > testing on EC2 (or other) farms? Since we only will need them > occasionally, but beat them to death when we do? Would it be cost > effective to run this on a farm? If there is no control over how > much memory bandwidth you get, you may not be able to get a > consistent load. Is there a similar issue with disk I/O? > > I guess it all depends on what you are really testing for, and if the differences between testing it on EC2 and it's actual use case really matter or can be factored out. Id be fairly reluctant to think I could get meaningful results for anything approaching actual use cases. Like for instance, what does our application do when 400 people log in might be completely different between EC2 and real deployments....and the kicker is, no matter what it does in testing, you aren't really going to to know what it does in production until you accurately simulate production. There are other sorts of things that you might find with EC2 though, where deploying on real hardware will be overkill. Like for instance how much CPU time does our forking model consume on 8 way hardware with 40 simultanious transactions going on. Thanks, Josh Paetzel -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20090707/a77a904e/attachment-0001.htm From scott at dier.name Tue Jul 7 13:34:24 2009 From: scott at dier.name (Scott Dier) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 18:34:24 +0000 Subject: [tclug-list] cheapest "farm"? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1617234542-1246991659-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-1753806295-@bxe1298.bisx.prod.on.blackberry> Another option is to prototype with ec2 and if you decide to go to your own metal run a cluster using eucalyptus which uses a similar (same?) api as ec2. --- Scott Dier Sent from mobile device -----Original Message----- From: steve ulrich Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 13:19:21 To: Mike Miller Cc: TCLUG List Subject: Re: [tclug-list] cheapest "farm"? mike - my comments were a bit tongue in cheek. if you're running this constantly you're typically much better off building out your own compute infrastructure. i would be remiss if i didn't point out that there are a lot of folks doing this themselves and a host of folks in this market segment. if you don't have the need to run large simulations on an ongoing basis, then utility compute resources like EC2 are a great way to go and amazon is by no means the only game in town on that, they've just made the process of setup and billing dead easy. On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 12:45 PM, Mike Miller wrote: > On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, steve ulrich wrote: > >> mike - >> >> building out your own compute infrastructure is so 2002. ;) >> >> i've used amazon EC2 for a very similar application where i've been >> running large simulations on their infrastructure with my own VM image that >> i use for my purposes. ?you can simply dial up the number of processors that >> you purchase and use. ?you're charged by the hour for the the number of CPU >> instances you use. >> >> instead of buying hardware yourself that you have to power up, replace >> HDDs, etc. for and manage connectivity for you let someone pay for that and >> simply use their resources on demand. > > > Once we get things going, we'll probably be using all (80 or so) cores 24/7 > for months on end. ?I assume the costs for Amazon EC2 would eventually > surpass our initial hardware costs ($25,000). > > Regarding power and management troubles -- someone else is doing that and we > don't have to pay them. ?I guess it is paid, in theory, by indirect cost > money from our grants to the college. > > Mike > -- steve ulrich (sulrich at botwerks.*) _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota tclug-list at mn-linux.org http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list From mbmiller+l at gmail.com Tue Jul 7 13:43:01 2009 From: mbmiller+l at gmail.com (Mike Miller) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 13:43:01 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [tclug-list] cheapest "farm"? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, steve ulrich wrote: > my comments were a bit tongue in cheek. if you're running this > constantly you're typically much better off building out your own > compute infrastructure. i would be remiss if i didn't point out that > there are a lot of folks doing this themselves and a host of folks in > this market segment. if you don't have the need to run large > simulations on an ongoing basis, then utility compute resources like EC2 > are a great way to go and amazon is by no means the only game in town on > that, they've just made the process of setup and billing dead easy. It sounds pretty interesting. An important consideration for most people is power consumption. It is easy to say that 80 CPUs times $0.03/hour times costs $25,000 for 434 days. I can also buy an 80-core system for $25,000. So after about 15 months the costs seem to be the same, but they aren't. I've had to manage my own system and I've had to pay for the electric bills, which are quite substantial. Depending on your circumstances, it seems quite possible that $0.03/hour for a CPU is less expensive than buying your own computer(s), even in the very long run. My situation is different because my team buys the hardware, but the management of the hardware and the electric bills are paid by someone else. So it is almost certainly going to be better for my team to buy the computers, though it might be worse for the university as a whole. (On the other hand, we might not be able to use EC2 because of confidentiality problems.) Mike From wdtj at yahoo.com Tue Jul 7 13:42:56 2009 From: wdtj at yahoo.com (Wayne Johnson) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 11:42:56 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [tclug-list] farms for stress testing (was: Re: cheapest "farm"?) In-Reply-To: <5823FA26-1A1D-4528-B542-A66C4CAF231C@tcbug.org> References: <4A538298.5040100@umn.edu> <573448.32145.qm@web53811.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <5823FA26-1A1D-4528-B542-A66C4CAF231C@tcbug.org> Message-ID: <947635.5740.qm@web53810.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Guess that was the issue I was interested in. We're a small company and can't really afford a bunch of n way machines for processing. Some of our customers have these huge servers and expect us to handle thousands of transactions per minute. We've found quite a few tweaks, both in our applications and the DB2 and Oracle back end databases. I'm just looking (OK, thinking with my mouth open) to see if farms are more cost effective than our local hardware. Thanks everyone for your input. Might also be an effective way to do a customer presentation. --- Wayne Johnson, | There are two kinds of people: Those 3943 Penn Ave. N. | who say to God, "Thy will be done," Minneapolis, MN 55412-1908 | and those to whom God says, "All right, (612) 522-7003 | then, have it your way." --C.S. Lewis ________________________________ From: Josh Paetzel To: Wayne Johnson Cc: Elvedin Trnjanin ; steve ulrich ; Mike Miller ; TCLUG List Sent: Tuesday, July 7, 2009 1:27:14 PM Subject: Re: [tclug-list] farms for stress testing (was: Re: cheapest "farm"?) On Jul 7, 2009, at 12:57 PM, Wayne Johnson wrote: We have a need to stress test our product. We have a few multi core machines to run as a DB server and App server but they are pretty heavily used and hiding under a desk. > >Now the question. Would it be reasonable to try and run stress testing on EC2 (or other) farms? Since we only will need them occasionally, but beat them to death when we do? Would it be cost effective to run this on a farm? If there is no control over how much memory bandwidth you get, you may not be able to get a consistent load. Is there a similar issue with disk I/O? > > > I guess it all depends on what you are really testing for, and if the differences between testing it on EC2 and it's actual use case really matter or can be factored out. Id be fairly reluctant to think I could get meaningful results for anything approaching actual use cases. Like for instance, what does our application do when 400 people log in might be completely different between EC2 and real deployments....and the kicker is, no matter what it does in testing, you aren't really going to to know what it does in production until you accurately simulate production. There are other sorts of things that you might find with EC2 though, where deploying on real hardware will be overkill. Like for instance how much CPU time does our forking model consume on 8 way hardware with 40 simultanious transactions going on. Thanks, Josh Paetzel -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20090707/dceacda1/attachment.htm From mbmiller+l at gmail.com Tue Jul 7 13:48:36 2009 From: mbmiller+l at gmail.com (Mike Miller) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 13:48:36 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [tclug-list] cheapest "farm"? In-Reply-To: <1617234542-1246991659-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-1753806295-@bxe1298.bisx.prod.on.blackberry> References: <1617234542-1246991659-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-1753806295-@bxe1298.bisx.prod.on.blackberry> Message-ID: On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, Scott Dier wrote: > Another option is to prototype with ec2 and if you decide to go to your > own metal run a cluster using eucalyptus which uses a similar (same?) > api as ec2. If it only costs $0.03 per core per hour to use it, I guess I have to test it out to see how it looks. If it really works for me, I should be able to direct people to it if they don't have the hardware at their university. Mike From mbmiller+l at gmail.com Tue Jul 7 15:28:42 2009 From: mbmiller+l at gmail.com (Mike Miller) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 15:28:42 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [tclug-list] cheapest "farm"? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: In a meeting today we looked at three options from HP and were told that Sun wants to compete with HP and match prices. The three HP options differed primarily in terms of the CPUs: Intel v. AMD. With AMD we could get cheaper DDR2 RAM but with Intel we would have to buy pricier DDR3 RAM. All could take SATA 3G HDDs with a RAID controller that would allow us to use RAID1 (simple mirroring) with two 1TB drives per unit. All were dual-socket quad-core machines, thus 8 cores per unit. I was thinking 4GB RAM per core or 32GB RAM per unit. They are 1U rack mountable. These are the two machines that we focused on most: HP ProLiant DL160 G6 Server (with Intel Xeon X5550) http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/15351-15351-3328412-241644-3328421-3884343.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN HP ProLiant DL165 G5 Server (with AMD Opteron 2384) http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/15351-15351-3328412-241644-3328421-3580133.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN With the configurations we were shown, the Intel was $2995 and the AMD was $1769, but those prices would increase with added RAM and probably with added HDD space. We decided that we need to do some testing to compare the two machines, and we have a couple of machines available. So I'm going to run some of my genome-scanning code to see how the machines perform. Do any of you have any opinions on these options, especially Xeon v. Opteron? I was told that Xeon was always faster but Opteron was cheaper. For some jobs Xeon was 20% faster and for some it was 100% faster. My guess is that I will do better, for my work, with a larger number of cheaper processors, but I'm going to do some testing. Mike From florin at iucha.net Tue Jul 7 16:31:58 2009 From: florin at iucha.net (Florin Iucha) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 16:31:58 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] cheapest "farm"? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20090707213158.GB26966@iris.iucha.org> On Tue, Jul 07, 2009 at 03:28:42PM -0500, Mike Miller wrote: > In a meeting today we looked at three options from HP and were told that > Sun wants to compete with HP and match prices. The three HP options > differed primarily in terms of the CPUs: Intel v. AMD. With AMD we could > get cheaper DDR2 RAM but with Intel we would have to buy pricier DDR3 RAM. > All could take SATA 3G HDDs with a RAID controller that would allow us to > use RAID1 (simple mirroring) with two 1TB drives per unit. All were > dual-socket quad-core machines, thus 8 cores per unit. I was thinking 4GB > RAM per core or 32GB RAM per unit. They are 1U rack mountable. > > These are the two machines that we focused on most: > > HP ProLiant DL160 G6 Server (with Intel Xeon X5550) > http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/15351-15351-3328412-241644-3328421-3884343.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN > > HP ProLiant DL165 G5 Server (with AMD Opteron 2384) > http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/15351-15351-3328412-241644-3328421-3580133.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN > > With the configurations we were shown, the Intel was $2995 and the AMD was > $1769, but those prices would increase with added RAM and probably with > added HDD space. > > We decided that we need to do some testing to compare the two machines, > and we have a couple of machines available. So I'm going to run some of > my genome-scanning code to see how the machines perform. > > > Do any of you have any opinions on these options, especially Xeon v. > Opteron? I was told that Xeon was always faster but Opteron was cheaper. > For some jobs Xeon was 20% faster and for some it was 100% faster. My > guess is that I will do better, for my work, with a larger number of > cheaper processors, but I'm going to do some testing. One important point that is often overlooked in these Intel-vs-AMD comparisons is the effective memory bandwidth. Most genomic applications are constrained by the memory access time, not as much by the CPU itself. Under my desk I have an older Dell dual-core (Xeon CPU 5140 @ 2.33GHz) and a newer HP quad-core (Xeon E5440 @ 2.83GHz). My application uses around 1 GB of RAM, and on a theoretical computer it should scale linearly with the number of cores (it computes some similarity measure between 10000 'strings'), but in the actual real-world, the dual core finishes in 8 hours and the quad-core in 7 and a half, despite the fact that all 6 CPUs are 100% busy. The Dell dual-core has FB-DIMM 1666 and the HP quad-core has DDR3 1333. Note that the quad-core is not the newer i7/Nehalem chips, but the older 'two dual cores on a piece of silicon, fighting over the same FSB'. Cheers, florin -- Bruce Schneier expects the Spanish Inquisition. http://geekz.co.uk/schneierfacts/fact/163 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20090707/1fa02c06/attachment-0001.pgp From mbmiller+l at gmail.com Wed Jul 8 01:45:06 2009 From: mbmiller+l at gmail.com (Mike Miller) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 2009 01:45:06 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [tclug-list] News Alert: Google Plans to Introduce a PC Operating System Message-ID: This is interesting (article below). Google is developing "Chrome OS" and Intel is developing "Moblin". Moblin is said to be "Linux-based". The article does not say that Chrome OS is Linux-based but it does say that Chrome OS is "open source." Strangely, I just happened to be reading this article earlier today: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2005/pulpit_20051117_000873.html But that is 3.5 years old and maybe Google is much stronger in OS development today having done Android and a company internal Linux distro (says the new article). Mike Breaking News Alert The New York Times Wednesday, July 8, 2009 -- 12:39 AM ET ----- Google Plans to Introduce a PC Operating System In a direct challenge to Microsoft, Google is expected to announce on Wednesday that it is developing an operating system for a personal computer based on its Chrome browser, according to two people briefed on Google's plans. The move would sharpen the already intense competition between Google and Microsoft, whose Windows operating system controls the basic functions of the vast majority of personal computers. Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/technology/companies/08operate.html?_r=1&hp From pcutler at gnome.org Wed Jul 8 03:54:05 2009 From: pcutler at gnome.org (Paul Cutler) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 2009 09:54:05 +0100 Subject: [tclug-list] News Alert: Google Plans to Introduce a PC Operating System In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <39428b2a0907080154q1db8fc4cy9625c2ed21d6fc14@mail.gmail.com> I'm currently at GUADEC, and there is a lot of buzz about Moblin. There's a BoF later today showing it off - Moblin is a full based Linux distro that is using Mutter (Clutter + Metacity) for the UI, and has a mostly complete stack of GNOME software underneath. (Some stuff is different, like ConnMan instead of Network-Manager). Ubuntu, SUSE, and Fedora will all be shipping Moblin based netbook versions next year, and GNOME 3.0 will be moving to Mutter as well. It's a pretty exciting time. It will be interesting to hear this morning what folks in the community think of Google's announcement. Paul On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 7:45 AM, Mike Miller > wrote: > This is interesting (article below). Google is developing "Chrome OS" and > Intel is developing "Moblin". Moblin is said to be "Linux-based". The > article does not say that Chrome OS is Linux-based but it does say that > Chrome OS is "open source." > > Strangely, I just happened to be reading this article earlier today: > > http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2005/pulpit_20051117_000873.html > > But that is 3.5 years old and maybe Google is much stronger in OS > development today having done Android and a company internal Linux distro > (says the new article). > > Mike > > > Breaking News Alert > The New York Times > Wednesday, July 8, 2009 -- 12:39 AM ET > ----- > > Google Plans to Introduce a PC Operating System > > In a direct challenge to Microsoft, Google is expected to announce on > Wednesday that it is developing an operating system for a personal > computer based on its Chrome browser, according to two people briefed on > Google's plans. > > The move would sharpen the already intense competition between Google and > Microsoft, whose Windows operating system controls the basic functions of > the vast majority of personal computers. > > Read More: > > http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/technology/companies/08operate.html?_r=1&hp > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20090708/892912ba/attachment.htm From webmaster at mn-linux.org Mon Jul 13 16:48:43 2009 From: webmaster at mn-linux.org (TCLUG Classifieds) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:48:43 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] New TCLUG Classified Ad Message-ID: <200907132148.n6DLmht21998@crusader.real-time.com> New TCLUG Classified Ad Category: Computer Type of Ad: For Sale Subject: Sun Ultra 60 I have a sun ultra 60 for sale. I would like $20 for it. The system has two processors and all the memory slots are full. No hard drives, CD or floppy. The only issue is the power supply is missing. Seller Email address: jkey at tomobiki dot dyndns dot org http://www.mn-linux.org/cgi-bin/classifieds/index.cgi From webmaster at mn-linux.org Mon Jul 13 16:48:42 2009 From: webmaster at mn-linux.org (TCLUG Classifieds) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:48:42 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] New TCLUG Classified Ad Message-ID: <200907132148.n6DLmgL21932@crusader.real-time.com> New TCLUG Classified Ad Category: Computer Type of Ad: For Sale Subject: Sun Ultra 60 I have a sun ultra 60 for sale. I would like $20 for it. The system has two processors and all the memory slots are full. No hard drives, CD or floppy. The only issue is the power supply is missing. Seller Email address: jkey at tomobiki dot dyndns dot org http://www.mn-linux.org/cgi-bin/classifieds/index.cgi From josh at trutwins.homeip.net Mon Jul 20 08:46:07 2009 From: josh at trutwins.homeip.net (Josh Trutwin) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 08:46:07 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] zoneminder - camera? Message-ID: <20090720084607.509f86f5@sinkhole> I've been meaning to setup zoneminder (www.zoneminder.com) for a while and had a wakeup call Saturday night when some a-hole(s) rummaged through my truck late at night - thankfully only made off with a worthless mp3 player and loose change. I'm curious if anyone has any experience with setting up a linux based home security system like this and can recommend a decent / affordable camera that does a nice job with night recording? Anyone setup zoneminder or have recommendations for other similar systems? Thanks, Josh From andyzib at gmail.com Mon Jul 20 11:00:13 2009 From: andyzib at gmail.com (Andrew S. Zbikowski) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:00:13 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] zoneminder - camera? In-Reply-To: <20090720084607.509f86f5@sinkhole> References: <20090720084607.509f86f5@sinkhole> Message-ID: Not to be an ass, but... While technology is great and all, it's no replacement for doing the simple things like rolling up the windows, locking the doors, and not leaving your keys in the ignition. I swear that someday I'm going to go over to my parent's house and drive their cars a block down the road just to prove a point... Just mentioning this as you didn't mention broken windows. :) Camera wise you're probably need an InfraRed cam in order to see in the dark. Don't forget to physically secure your camera. It won't do alot of good if the potential thief can unplug power or steal the camera. ;) -- Andrew S. Zbikowski | http://andy.zibnet.us IT Outhouse Blog Thing | http://www.itouthouse.com From dniesen at gmail.com Mon Jul 20 11:55:06 2009 From: dniesen at gmail.com (Donovan) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:55:06 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] zoneminder - camera? In-Reply-To: References: <20090720084607.509f86f5@sinkhole> Message-ID: <47f4d5e70907200955l72ad318axc86d804201715a6@mail.gmail.com> On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 11:00 AM, Andrew S. Zbikowski wrote: > Not to be an ass, but... > > While technology is great and all, it's no replacement for doing the > simple things like rolling up the windows, locking the doors, and not > leaving your keys in the ignition. I swear that someday I'm going to > go over to my parent's house and drive their cars a block down the > road just to prove a point... > > Just mentioning this as you didn't mention broken windows. :) > > Camera wise you're probably need an InfraRed cam in order to see in the dark. > > Don't forget to physically secure your camera. It won't do alot of > good if the potential thief can unplug power or steal the camera. ;) > > -- > Andrew S. Zbikowski | http://andy.zibnet.us > IT Outhouse Blog Thing | http://www.itouthouse.com > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > The cameras are a good deterrent (make them obvious and secure them), the actual footage doesn't always seem to be that useful. Often the only benefit is you get to watch your stuff walk away. I had a similar a-hole who went through my car for a couple of flash drives. Can't see those going for a lot on the street but my car has "computer repair" written all over it so it's a prime target. It annoyed me more than anything because I'm always losing flash drives as it is. I think I may go with a motion detector and retina-burning flood lights in my carport to startle/temporarily blind anyone who decides to take a peek at night. A recording of "step away from the car mf'er" might also be effective. I have setup ZoneMinder a few times and it is a screwy beast to get working properly. The biggest key is getting well-supported hardware. The capture cards seem easier to work with than IP cameras although I've only bought super-cheap IP cameras. BlueCherry.net (linked from ZoneMinder's site) carries ZoneMinder compatible hardware but I would recommend researching the item you buy through their forums to see what's involved in getting it working. ZM's supported hardware wiki is a starting point but it doesn't mean it will work easily out of the box. -- Donovan Niesen From josh at trutwins.homeip.net Mon Jul 20 11:56:15 2009 From: josh at trutwins.homeip.net (Josh Trutwin) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:56:15 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] zoneminder - camera? In-Reply-To: References: <20090720084607.509f86f5@sinkhole> Message-ID: <20090720115615.600d3413@sinkhole> On Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:00:13 -0500 "Andrew S. Zbikowski" wrote: > Not to be an ass, but... > > While technology is great and all, it's no replacement for doing the > simple things like rolling up the windows, locking the doors, and > not leaving your keys in the ignition. I swear that someday I'm > going to go over to my parent's house and drive their cars a block > down the road just to prove a point... > > Just mentioning this as you didn't mention broken windows. :) Yes - true, I had the truck outside cause it was loaded with rocks for landscaping and didn't put in garage. My keyless is broke on the thing so I don't lock it as the alarm goes off even if I use the f'n key to open the doors. I do usually park it in the garage but this was one of the rare nights I didn't. Researched cameras a little and yeah would have to be infrared. There's been reports of an f'n dude in a van prowling the neighborhood trying to talk to kids too - another reason I'm looking into this... Thanks, Josh From daniel.armbrust.list at gmail.com Mon Jul 20 12:01:49 2009 From: daniel.armbrust.list at gmail.com (Dan Armbrust) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:01:49 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] zoneminder - camera? In-Reply-To: References: <20090720084607.509f86f5@sinkhole> Message-ID: <82f04dc40907201001j4681a740m5a17b729bee1433@mail.gmail.com> On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 11:00 AM, Andrew S. Zbikowski wrote: > Not to be an ass, but... > > While technology is great and all, it's no replacement for doing the > simple things like rolling up the windows, locking the doors, and not > leaving your keys in the ignition. I swear that someday I'm going to > go over to my parent's house and drive their cars a block down the > road just to prove a point... > Heh, depends where you live. Where some of my former co-workers live in Minneapolis, they finally learned after about 4 broken windows that it is much easier to just leave the car unlocked, and with no valuables inside. That way, most of the miscreants won't break the windows when they come by - they just check the car, and move on to the next one.... What would be really cool is if you could integrate some motion detector software into the linux system observing the camera, and then have it take some sort of action - blast something over a loudspeaker, turn on a water hose, aim and fire a turret mounted paintball gun, etc. The possibilities are endless :) From andyzib at gmail.com Mon Jul 20 12:18:55 2009 From: andyzib at gmail.com (Andrew S. Zbikowski) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:18:55 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] zoneminder - camera? In-Reply-To: <82f04dc40907201001j4681a740m5a17b729bee1433@mail.gmail.com> References: <20090720084607.509f86f5@sinkhole> <82f04dc40907201001j4681a740m5a17b729bee1433@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: > What would be really cool is if you could integrate some motion > detector software into the linux system observing the camera, and then > have it take some sort of action - blast something over a loudspeaker, > turn on a water hose, aim and fire a turret mounted paintball gun, > etc. ?The possibilities are endless :) http://www.waterhobo.com/ -- Andrew S. Zbikowski | http://andy.zibnet.us IT Outhouse Blog Thing | http://www.itouthouse.com From mbmiller+l at gmail.com Mon Jul 20 13:13:38 2009 From: mbmiller+l at gmail.com (Mike Miller) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 13:13:38 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [tclug-list] zoneminder - camera? In-Reply-To: <82f04dc40907201001j4681a740m5a17b729bee1433@mail.gmail.com> References: <20090720084607.509f86f5@sinkhole> <82f04dc40907201001j4681a740m5a17b729bee1433@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 20 Jul 2009, Dan Armbrust wrote: > On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 11:00 AM, Andrew S. Zbikowski wrote: > >> While technology is great and all, it's no replacement for doing the >> simple things like rolling up the windows, locking the doors, and not >> leaving your keys in the ignition. I swear that someday I'm going to go >> over to my parent's house and drive their cars a block down the road >> just to prove a point... > > Heh, depends where you live. Where some of my former co-workers live in > Minneapolis, they finally learned after about 4 broken windows that it > is much easier to just leave the car unlocked, and with no valuables > inside. That way, most of the miscreants won't break the windows when > they come by - they just check the car, and move on to the next one.... A friend of mine had his window broken twice so he left the car unlocked to avoid more broken windows. It didn't work. His thieves were so stupid that they broke his window even though the car doors were unlocked! > What would be really cool is if you could integrate some motion detector > software into the linux system observing the camera, and then have it > take some sort of action - blast something over a loudspeaker, turn on a > water hose, aim and fire a turret mounted paintball gun, etc. The > possibilities are endless :) Sure, but be careful of how you do this. You don't want to shoot a paintball into your postman's eye. Strangely, you also don't want to injure a thief: I have heard of cases, and I think they were true stories, where thieves were injured by booby traps, so they sued the home owners and won damage awards. Mike From tclug at mikerochford.com Mon Jul 20 15:01:39 2009 From: tclug at mikerochford.com (Mike Rochford) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:01:39 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] zoneminder - camera? In-Reply-To: References: <20090720084607.509f86f5@sinkhole> <82f04dc40907201001j4681a740m5a17b729bee1433@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <406189300907201301u10d3f64ao2273f07f6cdc2569@mail.gmail.com> You are looking for something like a sentry gun. http://www.paintballsentry.com/ On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 1:13 PM, Mike Miller > wrote: > On Mon, 20 Jul 2009, Dan Armbrust wrote: > > > On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 11:00 AM, Andrew S. Zbikowski > wrote: > > > >> While technology is great and all, it's no replacement for doing the > >> simple things like rolling up the windows, locking the doors, and not > >> leaving your keys in the ignition. I swear that someday I'm going to go > >> over to my parent's house and drive their cars a block down the road > >> just to prove a point... > > > > Heh, depends where you live. Where some of my former co-workers live in > > Minneapolis, they finally learned after about 4 broken windows that it > > is much easier to just leave the car unlocked, and with no valuables > > inside. That way, most of the miscreants won't break the windows when > > they come by - they just check the car, and move on to the next one.... > > A friend of mine had his window broken twice so he left the car unlocked > to avoid more broken windows. It didn't work. His thieves were so stupid > that they broke his window even though the car doors were unlocked! > > > > What would be really cool is if you could integrate some motion detector > > software into the linux system observing the camera, and then have it > > take some sort of action - blast something over a loudspeaker, turn on a > > water hose, aim and fire a turret mounted paintball gun, etc. The > > possibilities are endless :) > > Sure, but be careful of how you do this. You don't want to shoot a > paintball into your postman's eye. Strangely, you also don't want to > injure a thief: I have heard of cases, and I think they were true > stories, where thieves were injured by booby traps, so they sued the home > owners and won damage awards. > > Mike > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20090720/d27795f3/attachment.htm From tclug at lizakowski.com Mon Jul 20 17:18:27 2009 From: tclug at lizakowski.com (Jeremy) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 17:18:27 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] zoneminder - camera? In-Reply-To: <82f04dc40907201001j4681a740m5a17b729bee1433@mail.gmail.com> References: <20090720084607.509f86f5@sinkhole> <82f04dc40907201001j4681a740m5a17b729bee1433@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200907201718.27275.tclug@lizakowski.com> Just put a radio transmitter on something that appears of value. And make sure you have the receipt for the item. Jeremy On Monday 20 July 2009 12:01:49 pm Dan Armbrust wrote: > On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 11:00 AM, Andrew S. Zbikowski wrote: > > Not to be an ass, but... > > > > While technology is great and all, it's no replacement for doing the > > simple things like rolling up the windows, locking the doors, and not > > leaving your keys in the ignition. I swear that someday I'm going to > > go over to my parent's house and drive their cars a block down the > > road just to prove a point... > > Heh, depends where you live. Where some of my former co-workers live > in Minneapolis, they finally learned after about 4 broken windows that > it is much easier to just leave the car unlocked, and with no > valuables inside. That way, most of the miscreants won't break the > windows when they come by - they just check the car, and move on to > the next one.... > > What would be really cool is if you could integrate some motion > detector software into the linux system observing the camera, and then > have it take some sort of action - blast something over a loudspeaker, > turn on a water hose, aim and fire a turret mounted paintball gun, > etc. The possibilities are endless :) > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20090720/e09f8452/attachment.htm From cncole at earthlink.net Mon Jul 20 18:50:02 2009 From: cncole at earthlink.net (Chuck Cole) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 18:50:02 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] zoneminder - camera? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: X10 has an electronic barking pit bull that can be activated by IR "people detectors". Chuck > -----Original Message----- > From: tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org > [mailto:tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org]On Behalf Of Mike Miller > Sent: Monday, July 20, 2009 1:14 PM > To: Dan Armbrust > Cc: TCLUG List > Subject: Re: [tclug-list] zoneminder - camera? > > > On Mon, 20 Jul 2009, Dan Armbrust wrote: > > > On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 11:00 AM, Andrew S. Zbikowski wrote: > > > >> While technology is great and all, it's no replacement for doing the > >> simple things like rolling up the windows, locking the doors, and not > >> leaving your keys in the ignition. I swear that someday I'm going to go > >> over to my parent's house and drive their cars a block down the road > >> just to prove a point... > > > > Heh, depends where you live. Where some of my former co-workers live in > > Minneapolis, they finally learned after about 4 broken windows that it > > is much easier to just leave the car unlocked, and with no valuables > > inside. That way, most of the miscreants won't break the windows when > > they come by - they just check the car, and move on to the next one.... > > A friend of mine had his window broken twice so he left the car unlocked > to avoid more broken windows. It didn't work. His thieves were so stupid > that they broke his window even though the car doors were unlocked! > > > > What would be really cool is if you could integrate some motion detector > > software into the linux system observing the camera, and then have it > > take some sort of action - blast something over a loudspeaker, turn on a > > water hose, aim and fire a turret mounted paintball gun, etc. The > > possibilities are endless :) > > Sure, but be careful of how you do this. You don't want to shoot a > paintball into your postman's eye. Strangely, you also don't want to > injure a thief: I have heard of cases, and I think they were true > stories, where thieves were injured by booby traps, so they sued the home > owners and won damage awards. > > Mike > > _______________________________________________ > From nospam at hiltonbsd.com Mon Jul 20 12:30:09 2009 From: nospam at hiltonbsd.com (Stephen Hilton) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:30:09 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] zoneminder - camera? In-Reply-To: References: <20090720084607.509f86f5@sinkhole> Message-ID: <4A64A9A1.9060005@hiltonbsd.com> Here is a pic of one security cam at our shop being stolen, he improvised a ladder from pallets, then cut it down. http://www.flickr.com/photos/suchen41/3739872206/ Andrew S. Zbikowski wrote: > > Don't forget to physically secure your camera. It won't do alot of > good if the potential thief can unplug power or steal the camera. ;) > From mbmiller+l at gmail.com Mon Jul 20 20:29:05 2009 From: mbmiller+l at gmail.com (Mike Miller) Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:29:05 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [tclug-list] zoneminder - camera? In-Reply-To: <4A64A9A1.9060005@hiltonbsd.com> References: <20090720084607.509f86f5@sinkhole> <4A64A9A1.9060005@hiltonbsd.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 20 Jul 2009, Stephen Hilton wrote: > Here is a pic of one security cam at our shop being stolen, he > improvised a ladder from pallets, then cut it down. > > http://www.flickr.com/photos/suchen41/3739872206/ Well, at least you can see part of his face. No luck catching him, I suppose. Mike From tlunde at gmail.com Tue Jul 21 07:52:14 2009 From: tlunde at gmail.com (Thomas Lunde) Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 07:52:14 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] zoneminder - camera? In-Reply-To: References: <20090720084607.509f86f5@sinkhole> <82f04dc40907201001j4681a740m5a17b729bee1433@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <2BB1EB3D-9426-4B15-80F2-42BD63A8129E@gmail.com> Mike wrote: > Sure, but be careful of how you do this. You don't want to shoot a > paintball into your postman's eye. Strangely, you also don't want to > injure a thief: I have heard of cases, and I think they were true > stories, where thieves were injured by booby traps, so they sued the > home > owners and won damage awards. > Mike is right. The case that everyone has in law school is from Iowa (and I went in New York!). It's about a spring-gun. Hooker v. Miller. 37 Iowa 613. Thomas From trieff at greencaremankato.com Tue Jul 21 08:47:21 2009 From: trieff at greencaremankato.com (Thomas Rieff) Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 08:47:21 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] zoneminder camera??? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: TCLUG, Interesting that this discussion should come up. I have been looking at setting up a trial system to get a handle on how this operates. I did have a conversation with the bluecherry folks in MO about cameras. Still pretty confusing on which direction to go. I was interested in buying one ip camera, as we have the network and poe switches available. They recommended ip network cameras have best video, ACTI...best outdoors, best for zoneminder are model 1231 or 1431. I have not done the research yet on these. For indoors, the dome model 3001 or 3401. If you want network pan/tilt use Trendnet. Still confusing when first looking at it. They also said you need to use v1.24, which is not in the repositories but is on there website. Anyone else have any thoughts. Maybe should have a zoneminder install fest??? Tom Thomas Rieff GreenCare 1717 3rd Avenue Mankato, MN 56001 (507) 344-8314 Office (507) 344-8316 Fax (507) 381-0660 Cell From kris.browne at gmail.com Tue Jul 21 09:30:51 2009 From: kris.browne at gmail.com (kristopher browne) Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 09:30:51 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] zoneminder camera??? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <9A0318E8-6EAD-4BFE-AD8C-C48685C3E99A@gmail.com> Geeks.com has a couple of IP cameras which should work fine for Zoneminder, though may not have POE or be environmentally sealed.. POE has been touchy as heck for me on middle end switches over the years, so you may want to read reviews on specific equipment before buying. POE injectors, because they don't rely on the switch, seem to be more successful for entry level setups. If you have the budget for it, Toshiba's IK-WB15A is is fantastic quality image, and PTZ. On Jul 21, 2009, at 8:47 AM, Thomas Rieff wrote: > TCLUG, > Interesting that this discussion should come up. I have been looking > at > setting up a trial system to get a handle on how this operates. I > did have a > conversation with the bluecherry folks in MO about cameras. Still > pretty > confusing on which direction to go. I was interested in buying one ip > camera, as we have the network and poe switches available. They > recommended > ip network cameras have best video, ACTI...best outdoors, best for > zoneminder are model 1231 or 1431. I have not done the research yet on > these. For indoors, the dome model 3001 or 3401. If you want network > pan/tilt use Trendnet. Still confusing when first looking at it. > They also said you need to use v1.24, which is not in the > repositories but > is on there website. > Anyone else have any thoughts. Maybe should have a zoneminder install > fest??? > Tom > > Thomas Rieff > GreenCare > 1717 3rd Avenue > Mankato, MN 56001 > (507) 344-8314 Office > (507) 344-8316 Fax > (507) 381-0660 Cell > > > > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list From goeko at Goecke-Dolan.com Tue Jul 21 15:02:58 2009 From: goeko at Goecke-Dolan.com (Brian Dolan-Goecke) Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:02:58 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] * Wi-Fi * @ Penguins Unbound Meeting July 25, 2009 Message-ID: <4A661EF2.6070406@Goecke-Dolan.com> This months PenguinsUnbound.com meeting will be Saturday July 25th at TIES, 1667 Snelling Ave. N., St. Paul, MN 55108 from 10:00 am to 12:00pm (See the web site http://www.penguinsunbound.com for directions and more info.) This month I am going to be talking about Wi-Fi and try to answer your questions. Some topics I plan to discuss Wi-Fi, how it works basics Linux Wi-Fi, hardware, configuration, tools Outdoor Wi-Fi, longer distance connections and Q & A.. Hope to see you there. Thanks. ==>brian. From goeko at Goecke-Dolan.com Fri Jul 24 01:04:34 2009 From: goeko at Goecke-Dolan.com (Brian Dolan-Goecke) Date: Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:04:34 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] Saturday * Wi-Fi * @ Penguins Unbound Meeting July 25, 2009 Message-ID: <4A694EF2.6030706@Goecke-Dolan.com> This months PenguinsUnbound.com meeting will be Saturday July 25th at TIES, 1667 Snelling Ave. N., St. Paul, MN 55108 from 10:00 am to 12:00pm (See the web site http://www.penguinsunbound.com for directions and more info.) This month I am going to be talking about Wi-Fi and try to answer your questions. Some topics I plan to discuss Wi-Fi, how it works basics Linux Wi-Fi, hardware, configuration, tools Outdoor Wi-Fi, longer distance connections and Q & A.. Hope to see you there. Thanks. ==>brian. From sraun at fireopal.org Sun Jul 26 17:26:01 2009 From: sraun at fireopal.org (Scott Raun) Date: Sun, 26 Jul 2009 17:26:01 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] Command-line e-mail-merge? Message-ID: My google-fu is failing - the hits I'm getting are all for either GUI stuff, or not quite what I'm headed for. Longer form - I have a file with e-mail and snail-mail addresses. I need to send an e-mail to everyone in the file to verify their snail- mail address. They all paid for a copy of a book 'on publication' - payment was 1.5+ years ago, 'on publication' is in another month, we need to make certain we have current addresses. Suggestions? Something to point me in an appropriate direction? -- Scott Raun sraun at fireopal.org From kris.browne at gmail.com Sun Jul 26 17:36:44 2009 From: kris.browne at gmail.com (kristopher browne) Date: Sun, 26 Jul 2009 17:36:44 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] Command-line e-mail-merge? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: To me, this screams for an answer in Perl, where text streaming and regular expressions should make short work of the issue. That being said, I have no doubt similar answers could be derived from most of the scripting languages in similar short order, dependent on familiarity. Kristopher Browne kris.browne at gmail.com kris.browne at me.com 612-353-6969 - Home 612-408-4431 - Cell http://www.google.com/profiles/kris.browne Now Playing: See You On The Other Side - This Binary Universe - BT You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair. On Jul 26, 2009, at 5:26 PM, Scott Raun wrote: > My google-fu is failing - the hits I'm getting are all for either GUI > stuff, or not quite what I'm headed for. > > Longer form - I have a file with e-mail and snail-mail addresses. I > need to send an e-mail to everyone in the file to verify their snail- > mail address. They all paid for a copy of a book 'on publication' - > payment was 1.5+ years ago, 'on publication' is in another month, we > need to make certain we have current addresses. > > Suggestions? Something to point me in an appropriate direction? > > -- > Scott Raun > sraun at fireopal.org > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20090726/d45b4fa4/attachment.htm From tclug at freakzilla.com Sun Jul 26 18:35:54 2009 From: tclug at freakzilla.com (Yaron) Date: Sun, 26 Jul 2009 18:35:54 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [tclug-list] Command-line e-mail-merge? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I can probably throw something together in Perl in about 5-10 minutes, so drop me a note if you don't get any better answers. On Sun, 26 Jul 2009, Scott Raun wrote: > My google-fu is failing - the hits I'm getting are all for either GUI > stuff, or not quite what I'm headed for. > > Longer form - I have a file with e-mail and snail-mail addresses. I > need to send an e-mail to everyone in the file to verify their snail- > mail address. They all paid for a copy of a book 'on publication' - > payment was 1.5+ years ago, 'on publication' is in another month, we > need to make certain we have current addresses. > > Suggestions? Something to point me in an appropriate direction? > > -- > Scott Raun > sraun at fireopal.org > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -Yaron -- From aristophrenic at warpmail.net Mon Jul 27 07:33:34 2009 From: aristophrenic at warpmail.net (Isaac Atilano) Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2009 07:33:34 -0500 Subject: [tclug-list] Command-line e-mail-merge? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1248698014.20972.1326957239@webmail.messagingengine.com> Do you have access to an SMTP server? If so, you can use awk and ssmtp or mailx. If you have perl, there is the Net::SMTP module that you can use to create emails. ----- Original message ----- From: "Yaron" To: "TCLUG" Date: Sun, 26 Jul 2009 18:35:54 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Re: [tclug-list] Command-line e-mail-merge? I can probably throw something together in Perl in about 5-10 minutes, so drop me a note if you don't get any better answers. On Sun, 26 Jul 2009, Scott Raun wrote: > My google-fu is failing - the hits I'm getting are all for either GUI > stuff, or not quite what I'm headed for. > > Longer form - I have a file with e-mail and snail-mail addresses. I > need to send an e-mail to everyone in the file to verify their snail- > mail address. They all paid for a copy of a book 'on publication' - > payment was 1.5+ years ago, 'on publication' is in another month, we > need to make certain we have current addresses. > > Suggestions? Something to point me in an appropriate direction? > > -- > Scott Raun > sraun at fireopal.org > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -Yaron -- _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota tclug-list at mn-linux.org http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list