[UFO Chicago] Shachter Computer Labs Acquires Microsoft Windows, New Hardware

[jay at m5.chicago.il.us]

Fellow Nerds,

Thanks to our esteemed colleague Ben Teifeld, who helped install it,
there is now a Microsoft Windows system on one of the Shachter
Computer Labs machines.  The native Windows system has, of course,
been augmented with a full cygwin download, and the machine provides
ssh and telnet services from within cygwin, so anyone who logs in
remotely is placed into the cygwin environment (I have not, so far,
succeeded in getting the nfs service to work from within cygwin).
>From now out, anyone who wants to experiment with Microsoft Windows in
a heterogeneous network, is welcome to do so at the Shachter Computer
Labs.

Our esteemed colleague Ben Teifeld has also indefinitely lent to the
Shachter Computer Labs a Compaq Proliant supercomputer, which doubles
as a space heater.  This has become our new "landru" machine,
replacing the old landru which has been decomissioned.  Five operating
systems have been installed on this computer -- 3 dialects of Linux,
and the latest releases of FreeBSD and NetBSD.  Shared storage among
these five systems (for, e.g., home directories) is provided by ZFS,
which is the only file system that everyone understands (except that
ZFS on NetBSD doesn't work, a fact that was not known in advance).
Purely for the fun of it, the 3 Linux systems use 3 different
filesystem types for their root filesystems: the Fedora system uses
ReiserFS, the Ubuntu system uses XFS, and the openSUSE system uses
btrfs (which openSUSE not only provides, but also supports -- the only
major Linux dialect that does, so far).

The following table summarizes the computers in the Shachter Computer
Labs that are available to the public.  All except "norman" are
multiboot machines, presenting you with a boot menu asking you which
operating system you want to boot.

(If your mail reader treats plain text as HTML, then the columns in
the following table will not be properly aligned for you.  But if your
mail reader treats plain text as HTML, then anything that happens to
you is your own fault.)


 Name           IP Addresses                     Operating Systems

landru          172.16.1.2 and 192.168.1.2       Fedora 19
                                                 openSUSE 13.1
                                                 Ubuntu 13.10
                                                 FreeBSD 10.0
                                                 NetBSD 6.1.1

vaal            172.16.1.3 and 192.168.1.3       Plan 9
                                                 FreeBSD 6
                                                 Fedora Core 6

norman          172.16.1.4 and 192.168.1.4       FreeBSD 9.0

nomad           172.16.1.5 and 192.168.1.5       openSUSE 11.4
                                                 RHEL 5.4
                                                 RHEL 6.1
                                                 Solaris 9
                                                 Solaris 10

ruk             172.16.1.6 and 192.168.1.6       CentOS 6.4
                                                 Ubuntu 12.4
                                                 OpenBSD 5.2
                                    NEW!! ->  ** Windows XP **


All of the above computers except vaal and norman have unused disk
storage on which other operating systems can be installed, so if there
are other operating systems, not in the above list, that you would
like to work or play with, you can recommend them to us.  Our existing
hardware does not support Haiku or Solaris 11; that may change if we
acquire new hardware.

We also acknowledge the generous contribution of Rick Beiles, who has
given the Shachter Computer Labs a large number of 16-port network
hubs.  They are available free of charge to anyone in the community
who wants them.


		Jay F. Shachter
		6424 N Whipple St
		Chicago IL  60645-4111
			(1-773)7613784   landline
			(1-410)9964737   GoogleVoice
			jay at m5.chicago.il.us
			http://m5.chicago.il.us

		"This was untrue.  I am not even faintly like a rose."