turning corporate refuse
into scientific research

News Updates for 2012

11/14/2012
Nothing much to report, all units quietly humming along. Now if I could just teach them to hum the same tune... 77,590,231 (#564 out of 606,353).

09/27/2012
I have just finished updating all active units to Ubuntu Server 12.04. They all show an increase in their Whetstone benchmark. It will be interesting to see if there is a matching improvement in points earned per week. 72,893,473 (#569 out of 603,148).

09/19/2012
Due to UPS age and power 'overload', I've had to take unit Eight down. In it's' place I brought back up Unit Nineteen, which as a PC uses less power, but also does less work. 72,136,547 (#571 out of 602,643).

09/16/2012
Well, only news was a couple of units had problems restarting from a power failure last week. Otherwise, nothing new to report. 71,765,771 (#571 out of 602,420).

08/11/2012
All is quiet. All units running normal. 68,037,077 (#587 out of 598,145).

07/10/2012
All quiet, no big news. Oh wait, I'm rated at 593!!!!!! I broke the 600 mark!!! 64,676,778 (#593 out of 596,446).

06/08/2012
I've decided to drop the Facebook page for Refuse For Research. It was simply a parrot of my RSS and Twitter feeds. On the other hand, I've added a ShareThis widget to allow visitors to share the site on their favorite social site. All units are running smoothly. 60,977,396 (#624 out of 594,559).

05/19/2012
I have been given another 4 CPU capable server. Unfortunately it only had 2 CPUs installed. So, for $64 I bought 2 CPU kits for the server off of eBay. It's now up and running 8 threads. As a side effect of my power constraints, I've had to turn off Units Two and Nineteen. 58,980,390 (#638 out of 593,540).

04/14/2012
Unit Fourteen's troubles stem from a failed BIOS battery. I'll get a replacement in shortly. Also, due to overloading UPS A, Unit One has been shutdown. This does mean that I was able to power up Units Thirteen and Nineteen. Unit Nineteen needed to have a new install performed as well. 55,538,944 (#650 out of 590,965).

04/11/2012
I have bought a UPS Network card that allows the use of a temperature sensor. I have installed this on UPS A. You will now see 'ENVIRONMENT' listed on the Status Panel. In other news, Unit 14 seems to be having some trouble with occasionally locking up. 55,336,144 (#651 out of 590,820).

04/06/2012
Wow! Big news! I received 4 servers today. Two of them only had a single CPU, but they were the same part number. This allowed me to combine them into a single dual-CPU server. Another had 2 CPUs already, and the forth is a slightly older model with just 1 CPU, so I'm holding that in reserve. Now the bad news. In order to make room on the UPSs I had to turn off a few units. So here's the run down: Six and Seven got upgraded to new servers. Seventeen, Eightteen and Twenty got scrapped (I don't need that many spare units). Nine, Thirteen and Nineteen are now my offline spares. As far as how this changes the overall pool, I went from 16 units running 61 threads to 14 units running 62 threads. So more threads on faster CPUs. This should show an increase in my points per week.

03/20/2012
Unit Twenty has locked again. It has been replaced with the old Unit Thirteen. 53,291,021 (#668 out of 589,183).

02/22/2012
Not much new here, although I did have to reboot Unit Twenty. I don't know why, but it either failed at some point during it's weekly reboot, or it locked up while processing. 51,168,763 (#683 out of 586,754).

02/12/2012
I have now completed the setup of a Facebook page: https://facebook.com/ Refuse For Research 50,440,706 (#680 out of 585,719).

02/10/2012
I have just set up a Twitter account to broadcast the News Updates. 50,270,986 (#682 out of 585,492).

01/27/2012
Unit Eightteen has been brought back online in place of Unit Seven. The new UPS management cards have allowed me to better balance the power load so that the most powerful servers are online. 49,457,507 (#690 out of 584,406).

01/24/2012
Unit Sixteen has been running smoothly without any issues. Unfortunately, Unit Eightteen has been temporarily taken off line because the UPS it is on is also the UPS for Sixteen, which became overloaded. I have completed the setup of the new UPS management cards and I now have a rough idea of how much power each unit pulls. This has allowed me to come up with a plan to rearrange some of the units so that I can bring Eightteen back on line. I have also added a new graph to show how long the units have been in the pool. There was some website cleanup and tidying as well. Hopefully, you won't even notice those changes. 49,145,239 (#688 out of 584,026).

01/03/2012
I've been given another quad processor server to work with. This means that the old Unit Sixteen will be replaced, not repaired. Also, I'm taking the time to upgrade the network management cards in the 3 UPSs to allow me the ability to see a log of power usage as well as better control over each UPS. With all of these changes you may see some red or yellow lights on the status panel until I get them fully configured. Also, the KVM/IP unit I've been using to remote access the consoles, has finally proven to be too old to work with any current browser/OS. So, that now goes in the trash as well. 48,026,347 (#694 out of 582,546).