jumpy jumpy vitamins « Displaced, temporarily

Displaced, temporarily

At work, we’re expanding our server room by bringing the entrance wall about a meter forward. This will give enough room so that both my boss and I can stand comfortably in there at the same time; it will also allow us to get behind and around servers as necessary. However, while the room is under construction, I can’t use my desk for all the plastic and dust and equipment flying about.

I spent yesterday camped out in a conference room with a laptop. Students tend to go there to take breaks from research (no food in the lab, dontchaknow), so I actually got to talk to them about something other than computers or their data or their pending conference presentation or thesis defense. It was also nice having the refrigerator nearby, and somebody left a bunch of very tasty Rainier cherries on the table for public consumption.

Today the laptop is inadequate for the work I’m doing, so I’ve commandeered a storage room with an Ethernet jack and made it into my temporary office. I’m going barebones here, though, with just one monitor on my beloved Gentoo box. It’s going to take some getting used to.

When the room is not under construction, we’re taking advantage of the summer lull as a chance to upgrade infrastructure. First on the list is a new server to operate the tape backups on a new jukebox. It’ll be using the mobo, CPU, and memory that we removed when we upgraded the offsite file server, a hard drive that has been collecting dust in a drawer, and a new external SCSI adapter. Hopefully I can fold it into the budding distcc cluster without too much trouble.