we are proud to announce that we finally received a replacement Ethernet-Board for our Cray Y-MP EL (if someone of you happens to have another one laying around, please tell us! We urgently need spares).
Because of this we were able to take the Cray Y-MP EL back into operation. From today on this machine will be running again 24x7. All user-accounts as well as our guest account are also available on the Cray. To use the Y-MP EL, choose number 1 (hostname yel) from the Host-Chooser-Menu and log on using your username and password. Regarding the performance, please remember that this machine has Vector-CPUs. For more information, please see: http://www.cray-cyber.org/systems/yel.php)

Furthermore majestix, our Control Data 4680 is also back in operation every Saturday. Due to a hard disk failure we needed to reinstall EP/IX 2.2.1AA and recompile and port all the layered products. Thanks to Gerard van der Grinten who spent one week here at Cray-Cyber.org and reinstalled majestix and fixed some of the tape drives of the Cyber. More information about the Control Data 4680: http://www.cray-cyber.org/systems/majestix.php

That means that we now have the following machines in operation:

• Cray Y-MP EL running UNICOS 9 (yel) 24x7
• Cyber 960-32 running NOS and NOS/VE (cy960) - every Saturday
• Sun Enterprise 10000 running Solaris 10 (e10k) - every Saturday
• Control Data 4680 running EP/IX 2.2.1AA - every Saturday.

We are still working on taking the SGI Origin 2000 back into operation and will announce its availability as soon as we are ready.

Have fun using our systems and don't hesitate to ask us if you have any additional questions. Best Regards,
Your Cray-Cyber-Team

A vast amount of our documentation is currently located on microfishes. We of course have microfiche reader, so access to this documentation isn't a problem for us. But! Wouldn't it be much more convenient, to have access to all this information electronically? With the PDF viewer of choice? Maybe even with full text retrieval? Well... of course, this would be great! So, we did a first effort this weekend on the way. We startet investigation on a high quality easy to use way of digitizing microfiches. First idea was, to just take high resolution pictures directly of the microfiche reader screen. To surpress interference of the surrounding light, we also did some tests in the dark. Both test series showed useful results, although quite a lot of post processing will be neccessary. We will take another try with a digital SLR, where we can fix focus, aperture and exposure time. This should give nearly the same light and color on each photograph, which makes automated post processing much easier.

Another try was, to use the macro mode of a digicam and backlight the microfiche. So, we created a white drawing with GIMP, turned up brightness of the laptop screen to maximum and put on one fiche on the laptop display. This proofed to not be usable. At least not on a 1024x768 resolution. Besides using a SLR, we'll also trying a modern high resolution scanner (9600x4800 dpi) with backlight addon for scanning slides.

Trying to get bringup.lock lock... OK
Checking that all other domains are down....  NO
Bringing up domain e10k-pub
Starting: hpost 
Opening SNMP server library...

Significant contents of /export/home/ssp/.postrc:
#
logfile

Reading centerplane asics to obtain bus configuration...
Bus configuration determined to be 3F.
phase cplane_isolate: CP domain cluster mask clear...
phase init_reset: Initial system resets...
phase jtag_integ: JTAG probe and integrity test...
phase mem_probe: Memory dimm probe...
phase iom_probe: I/O module type probe...
phase jtag_bbsram: JTAG basic test of bootbus sram...
phase proc1: Initial processor module tests...
phase pc/cic_reg: PC and CIC register tests...
phase dtag: CIC DTAG tests...
phase mem: MC register and memory tests...
phase io: I/O controller tests...
phase procmem2: Processor vs. memory II tests...
phase lbexit: Centerplane connection tests...
phase npb_mem: Non-Proc Board MC and memory tests...
phase npb_iopc: Non-Proc Board IOPC register tests...
phase npb_io: Non-Proc Board I/O controller tests...
phase npb_cplane: Non-Proc Board centerplane connection tests...
phase nmb_procmem2: Non-Mem Board Proc vs. memory II tests...
phase final_config: Final configuration...
Configuring in 3F, FOM = 802816.00: 56 procs, 2 Scards, 57344 MBytes.
Creating OBP handoff structures...
Configured in 3F with 56 processors, 2 Scards, 57344 MBytes memory.
Interconnect       frequency is  99.902 MHz, from SNMP MIB.
Processor external frequency is 199.805 MHz, from SNMP MIB.
Processor internal frequency is 399.610 MHz, from proc clk_mode probe.
Boot processor is 1.0 = 4
POST (level=16, verbose=20) execution time 18:50
Boot processor 4 written to /var/opt/SUNWssp/etc/e10k/e10k-pub/bootproc
Updating domain e10k-pub with bootproc 4 domainInstance 1 and interrupt vector MIB...  OK
Starting obp_helper -m 4...   OK
Starting netcon_server -p 4 ...   OK

Hello Users! Some of you might have noticed already, that our webcams are up and running again. Freddy did some cheating and hacking with our Xen environment. And voila, we again will provide you with the brightest and most colorful pictures live out of the heart of Cray-Cyber.org.

Further I did some troubleshooting on the missing talk to the operator feature which was broken since switching to the new Xen environment a few weeks back. Cause were some errors in the inetd config file... So, from now on, talk will be enabled again from the telnet login screen to Cray-Cyber.org.