R.I.P suitsbeta, the death of SUITS server

If you’ve recently accessed Sydney University IT Society’s website, you might have noticed that it loaded rather slowly. About an hour later, I received an HTTP 500 while trying to get to the website, and it won’t even come up.

Later today, our IT guy sent an email with the subject “The death of suitsbeta”:

At approximately 1445 today, suitsbeta shut itself down, never to wake up again. Attempts were made to revive it by powering it up, but alas it failed to POST. Our thoughts go out to its family and friends.

Tim

So it turns out that our trusty server that hosted our website has kicked the bucket after its dedicated service to the society. Even though it has graduated from ‘beta’ so that the internal DNS name of ‘suits’ pointed to it, it will always be remembered as ‘suitsbeta’.

It was Pentium 4 1.6 GHz, with only 768MB of memory and less hard disk space than your average laptop.

I was fortunate enough to be with it in its final moments, and watched while it booted into the linux 2.6 kernel. It took minutes upon minutes to check even a few megabytes of the kernel image to see if it is initramfs.

Anyway, we are currently in search of a new server, and let’s look forward to a newer and better machine. Maybe even virtualise the server so disaster recovery is a bit less painful.

Different computing degrees are similar yet distinct

I have been thinking about the different computing undergraduate degrees offered at Sydney University: software engineering (SE), computer science (CS) and information technology (IT). Each of these are offered by a different department: School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Faculty of Science, and School of IT respectively.

So here’s what I think are the difference between them:

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Upgrading computer without reinstalling Windows

One question that sometimes gets asked is, “How easy is it to upgrade a computer?” The answer is that it’s often quite simple (for someone who knows how to take apart a computer and replace parts). For others, just let your techie friends do the work.

Upgrading a computer can be a matter of less than an hour, including testing. This includes installing a new hard drive, adding more memory, etc. There are times, though, when upgrading a computer is not a simple task. One of the complications in upgrading a computer arises when your try to upgrade your CPU or motherboard, or both. It’s because Windows doesn’t like it when the core system hardware is changed. It might not even work at all.

But there’s a way around having to reinstalling Windows.

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