Re: [GTALUG] Dell servers for cheap

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Stewart C. Russell via talk 

| via Seneca:

Thanks.  I always like to hear about this kind of thing.

| == Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers
| 
| - quantity available: 22 units
| - some with 2x dual core processors, others with 1x dual core processor
| - 4GB RAM (8x512MB; only a few have more RAM)
| - some have PERC RAID controllers
| - rack mounting rails included
| - a few fibre channel HBAs may be available 
| - limited quantity of sleds for Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives are 
available
| - specs: 
https://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/2950_specs.pdf

I think that the newest processors that these could have were
discontinued 10 years ago.  And they take a lot of power.  For
example, the Xeon X5365 (pure guess at a best case) takes 150W by
itself.

Beware of noise.  Rackmount servers are best kept in server rooms.

4GiB RAM is a little light these days, especially for servers.  Memory
is FBD (not consumer stuff).  There are no free slots.  Replacement
memory might well be cheap on ebay or kijiji since it is well past its
prime -- I haven't looked.

SAS drives are expensive and there's probably not much to recommend
them for our home labs.  Consider: 73GB SAS drive for $20 vs. a 120G
SATA SSD for $24.99 (current Newegg.ca sale; $4.99 shipping).  I think
that these boxes can only support SATA with an added controller.
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Re: [GTALUG] war story: fixing a doc bug can be hard

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Howard Gibson via talk 

|I am working on a Perl app, and I have written a man page for it.  I 
|do not expect to learn groff ever.  I can hack something that seems 
|to work.

You just have to take a sample man page and hack it into your man
page.  Until you need to do something tricky.

I assume that there is some perl convention for documentation (POD?),
but I'm not emersed in that culture.

|How many people are limited to 80 columns.

You are being sarcastic, right?

|Please note that I have problems with wide web pages.  I have my 
|1080p internet screen divided between my browser, my email and my 
|FVWM buttons.  A lot of web pages do not fit in the space I leave 
|them.  I hate them.

HTML has been a battleground between purists who think rendering is
the business of the, uhh, renderer (i.e. on the client side) and the
"designers" who are sure that they need control.  Both have a point
but the wrong side has been winning for 20 years.

Heaven help you if you are vision-impaired or you are trying to view
on an uncommon device or with a minority browser.

Buy an UltraHD TV or monitor.  Or put your buttons on the bottom (I
hate that because the normal aspect ratios are too wide so putting
buttons on the bottom makes that even worse).
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Re: [GTALUG] war story: fixing a doc bug can be hard

[Howard Gibson via talk]

On Mon, 8 Apr 2019 10:48:59 -0400 (EDT)
"D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk"  wrote:

> I'm reading dnf(8) on Fedora 29 and get irked by the layout of the
> options.
> --disableexcludes=[all|main|],
> --disableexcludepkgs=[all|main|]
> 
> Here's what "man dnf" shows on a terminal that is 80
> columns wide.  Ugly.
> 
>--disableexcludes=[all|main|],   --disableexcludep‐
>kgs=[all|main|]

Hugh,

   I am working on a Perl app, and I have written a man page for it.  I do not 
expect to learn groff ever.  I can hack something that seems to work.  How many 
people are limited to 80 columns.

   Please note that I have problems with wide web pages.   I have my 1080p 
internet screen divided between my browser, my email and my FVWM buttons.  A 
lot of web pages do not fit in the space I leave them.  I hate them.  

-- 
Howard Gibson 
hgib...@eol.ca
jhowardgib...@gmail.com
http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson
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[GTALUG] Dell servers for cheap

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

via Seneca:

Please email Lev Piaseckyj at l...@masterfile.com to arrange pickup or with 
questions.

== Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers

- quantity available: 22 units
- some with 2x dual core processors, others with 1x dual core processor
- 4GB RAM (8x512MB; only a few have more RAM)
- some have PERC RAID controllers
- rack mounting rails included
- a few fibre channel HBAs may be available 
- limited quantity of sleds for Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives are available
- specs: https://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/2950_specs.pdf

Dell PowerEdge 2950 server with ONE dual core processor - $80 each

Dell PowerEdge 2950 server with TWO dual core processors - $100 each

SAS Hard Drives for PE2950
- 73GB 15k Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives
- quantity available: 29 units
- $20 each wiped (to recover cost of wiping)

== Also available:

- many older Dell servers: PE2850, PE2750, PE2650, PE1750 with rails

- many 19” Dell LCD monitors (models 1908FP, 1907FP, 1905FP) and a few 21"

- APC AP7960 Switched Rack PDUs (Power Distribution Units)
https://toronto.craigslist.org/tor/ele/d/north-york-apc-ap7960-switched-rack/6846874582.html

- McDATA Sphereon 4500 Fabric Switch (fibre channel)
https://toronto.craigslist.org/tor/sop/d/north-york-mcdata-sphereon-4500-fabric/6861112354.html

- 3com SuperStack 4500 50-port ethernet switches
https://toronto.craigslist.org/tor/sop/d/north-york-3com-superstack-port/6861133481.html

- Dell 4210 Server Rack Enclosure, 19” x 42U
https://toronto.craigslist.org/tor/sys/d/north-york-dell-4210-server-rack/6846844333.html

- Dell ML6000 tape library with 2 expansion modules
- Dell ML6000 tape library with 1 expansion module
- Dell PowerVault 136T tape library
- older Cisco ethernet switches, Catalyst 2950, 2960, 3550, 3560
- older 3com 4400 series ethernet switches
- older Belkin KVMs
- old small Wacom tablets
- many computer speakers
- many power cables, ethernet cables, power bars

Everything would have to be picked up at Masterfile offices, near Eglinton & 
Wynford Drive.

Please email Lev Piaseckyj at l...@masterfile.com to arrange pickup or with 
questions.

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[GTALUG] war story: fixing a doc bug can be easy

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

I was reading some of the documentation of dnf.  I also built the dnf 
package on Fedora 29.

In the process, I found
(1) a spelling error
(2) three error messages pointing at problems with the .rst files

It wasn't too hard to figure out what the fixes should be.

Since the source is on github, I could just edit the files and make a
push request.

These three commits were accepted a couple of days later.




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[GTALUG] war story: fixing a doc bug can be hard

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

I'm reading dnf(8) on Fedora 29 and get irked by the layout of the
options.
--disableexcludes=[all|main|],
--disableexcludepkgs=[all|main|]

Here's what "man dnf" shows on a terminal that is 80
columns wide.  Ugly.

   --disableexcludes=[all|main|],   --disableexcludep‐
   kgs=[all|main|]

For those of you with MUAs that mangle this kind of stuff: the two
options don't fit on one line so something broke the line in a
terrible place and then filled the whitespace to justify the result.

It would be a lot better to just break the line at the whitespace and
to not justify the result.  The "not justify" part should just fall
out of there being no whitespace to stretch.

In an attempt to fix this, I tried to figure out how this problem
arose.  Surely this would be easy -- I was a troff adept forty years
ago.  And surely troff couldn't have change much because
(1) the orginal author, Joe Osssanna, died in 1977
(2) (I think) it is chained down by POSIX standard
(3) the language rules made it hard to extend

It turns out that the document representation and transformation isn't
what I thought it was.  It used to be that one wrote man pages in
troff, using the "an" macros, optionally with tbl preprocessing for
tables.

The dnf documentation is in a Python representation called
reStructured Text (.rst), not troff.

The .rst gets formatted by a thing called sphinx, a complex Python
system.  Among other things, it produces a formatted manpage that gets
shipped inside the dnf RPM.  So that seems easy, if odd.

But no.  That formatting cannot take account of terminal width or
characteristics.  So the man command, when confronted with one of
these files, process it in an intricate way, approximately:

gunzip -c /usr/share/man/man8/dnf.8.gz |
/usr/bin/preconv -e UTF-8 |
/usr/bin/tbl |
/usr/bin/nroff -mandoc -Tutf8 |
/usr/bin/less -r

The most peculiar part of that pipeline preconv.  It converts the
formatted document back into troff input!

In the case of dnf(8), the resulting troff file has a few problems
with the paragraph for these option but they don't explain this
particular misformatting.

The main problem seems to be in the "andoc" macros or in groff (the
GNU implementation of *roff).  And yes, groff has differences from the
troff I knew 40 years ago.

Getting this far in the problem has taken a few steps.

- download the source for dnf and build the .rpm

- attempt to figure out what builds what.  The build log isn't as
  clear as I'd hope.  I mistakenly thought it was rst2man but it is
  sphinx (they do share code).

- air my issues on an appropriate mailing list.  Contrary to the
  documentation, you actually have to join the list to post.
  So far this is the only traffic on the list this month.
  

Current state:

- I think that some things are wrong with the resulting ephemeral nroff 
  document but I don't know what's at fault and it isn't too important to 
  me.  I've reported it to the responsible authorities but I'm not sure 
  that they accept that there are problems.

- nroff -mandoc is doing something inappropriate with .TP macros but I
  don't know where the blame lies.  It surely requires engaging with
  another community.  I may run out of steam before getting farther.
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