Behemoth at Robert Pogson

I built Beast as my terminal server years ago. Beast has a 1.8 gHz AMD64 CPU. At first it had 1 gB RAM but I upgraded a bit over time. Beast II or Behemoth is a bit like Frankenstein’s creature: bits and pieces of Beast plus some newer stuff. I did not go for a quad-core CPU at first. I could not see using 125 watts of power to run at 2.4 gHz or so. I chose obsolete technology, an Opteron 1220. The reason? I wanted a bit of clockspeed, AMD’s memory control, dual core and ECC RAM. The cache on this old Opteron is 1MB per core while Beast had 512MB altogether. Along with terabyte drives, Behemoth will be snappy. I will know as soon as the Opteron arrives. It is back-ordered. In the meantime, I will plan my first project for Behemoth: a conference of teachers. I want to show them what performance is. They are used to ancient hardware and software in the schools.

RAID is an important advantage in a terminal server. A school cannot afford to have a hundred extra hard drives in the system but they can afford a few on the server, hence four terabyte drives in RAID 1 for small files and RAID 1+0 for large files. I expect most of the increase in performance for interaction will come from the bigger/faster drives. My old ones moved data at 40 MB/s. Thesse babies can do 100 MB/s and in RAID 0, I should get double that, a five times increase. I used RAID 1 only in Beast.

RAM will go from DDR400 to DDR2 at 800 and there will be more, 8gB in all. I want to be able to hold lots of content in caches so the hard drives will not limit performance.

At first, I will backup Beast onto the 1 TB drives and then configure them to boot. The old drives were 200 gB IDE and SATA. The new setup will be much faster. I was even using compressed filesystems in the old setup.

The upgrade went well except that one stick of RAM was bent out of shape/broken on the way and I did have to go quad-core. Now I can dry my hair. Because of the broken RAM I have only 4 gB but that is OK. Beast still kicks butt. Now, to find projects that actually require 4 gB RAM …

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.