The Art of Dumpster Diving

When I woke up this morning, my first thought was “Sweet, going dumpster diving today”. After thinking about it for a little while longer, I started to get a little depressed about going, it seemed almost like a waste of time on a monday morning, there wouldn’t be anything good in the dumpsters!

Despite these thoughts, I called up Joe and we went anyways. Bright and early. 10 oclock.

Now, of course, thinking I wouldn’t find anything, I practically struck gold. After careful observation of the electronics dumpster, Joe and i managed to pull out two old Compaq servers. One 5U rack server, and one enormous tower server. Each has 5 hotswap bays which I am very excited about. Now of course, seeing as they were in the dump, neither are in working condition, but I do plan to change this. Me and Joe will be directing attention to them Wednesday evening to swap some parts here and there and see what will do.

I was very surprised to see that the tower still had all 5 hard drives in it. I believe each one is 4.5 Gb, but since the computer doesn’t turn on, I don’t know for sure. Thats just what the labels on the bays said. The drives could be bigger. We’ll see once i get it up and running. I plan on swapping out the motherboard and power supply with newer ones. and then i can use the RAID controller thats already in there and hook up all the drives. We’ll see if we can get it working.

As for the rack, I’m not quite sure what I can do with that one. It has no drives and seems to only take SCSI drives which I don’t have any of. But i have yet to fiddle with that as well.

Definitely will write more on what happens with these computers soon.

Heres pics:

http://s297.photobucket.com/albums/mm238/theanti9/?action=view&current=IMG_3529.jpg

http://s297.photobucket.com/albums/mm238/theanti9/?action=view&current=IMG_3530.jpg

http://s297.photobucket.com/albums/mm238/theanti9/?action=view&current=IMG_3531.jpg

http://s297.photobucket.com/albums/mm238/theanti9/?action=view&current=IMG_3532.jpg

C# Random String Generators

Heres a little bit of code for making random strings. I’m sure someone will find it useful. I used to use it a lot in web development. Not sure how useful it would be for software development but use it if you’d like to :)


using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace Ruf
{
public static class StringGnerator
{
public static Char[] charArray = { ‘-’, ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, ‘d’, ‘e’, ‘f’, ‘g’, ‘h’, ‘i’, ‘j’, ‘k’, ‘l’, ‘m’, ‘n’, ‘p’, ‘q’, ‘r’, ‘s’, ‘t’, ‘u’, ‘v’, ‘w’, ‘x’, ‘y’, ‘z’, ’1′, ’2′, ’3′, ’4′, ’5′, ’6′, ’7′, ’8′, ’9′, ’0′, ‘_’ };

public static string RandomStr()
{
String returns = “”;
Random r = new Random();
for (int i = 0; i < 11; i++)
{
returns += “” + charArray[(int)(r.NextDouble() + 1.0 * 38.0)];
}
return returns;
}

public static string RandomStr(int Length)
{
String returns = “”;
Random r = new Random();
for (int i = 0; i < Length; i++)
{
returns += “” + charArray[(int)(r.NextDouble() + 1.0 * 38.0)];
}
return returns;
}

public static string RandomStr(int Seed, int Length)
{
String returns = “”;
Random r = new Random(Seed);
for (int i = 0; i < Length; i++)
{
returns += “” + charArray[(int)(r.NextDouble() + 1.0 * 38.0)];
}
return returns;
}

}
}

Thoughts About Distributed Computing

For me, distributed and parallel computing is one of the most interesting areas in computer science that I have found so far. I would really love to do work/research with it.

Distributed and Parallel Computing, at least from how I see it, seems to be the future of computers and processing power. Processors are starting to reach towards their physical limitations. So instead of making one processor even better, why not just use several, or even hundreds.

Slowly, I’m putting together my spare parts that I have at home into more computers to use. I got two more working in the last 2 days, both of which are semi decent machines. The main thing that I want to do with them is to try to make some of my own distributed applications that will be able to spread its processes out over several computers. Right now I have 3 computers that I want to use in my distributed system, the most powerful of which will be the main computer that is in charge of assigning the tasks. the other two, which are not as powerful, but still can handle plenty, will be sent instructions that will be processed and then they will send results back to the main server.

Now seeing as the 2 secondary nodes that will be in the system do not have the same specs, I have to make sure the server pays attention to the % of their resources that are being used when it goes to assign instructions. If the slower computer has been assigned less, but is using more of its resources, the next task that needs to be processed will be sent to the other computer.

Currently both of my secondary nodes are running Windows XP. This is fine I guess, but it seems like a large waste of system resources to have to run full windows. Though I realize that there is no way in hell that I can actually do this, I would love to write my own very basic OS just to handle being a secondary node in a distributed system. A node that when it turns on, simply connects to the central server, waits for its tasks, and then executes and sends back reports. No need for hogging resources with a gui or anything. All that is particularly necessary is enough to execute instructions and send/receive data over the network. But, when you actually think about it, that would take a very long time for me to figure out how to do. I don’t know the first thing about where an operating system starts really. Maybe I could use a linux kernel and just build off of that and get rid of things that aren’t really needed. I need to do a lot of research on this one.

This seems like it has the opportunity to be extremely efficient. Just a lightweight OS meant solely for being a secondary machine in a distributed  system would be so much faster than running anything i could create as a windows application. Unfortunately, I don’t know where to begin. Maybe I will set this one aside as a very long term project, slowly do research on it, and spend the bulk of my time on other projects are already have going like Fizzure. Haven’t worked on that one in a few days. Need to get back to it. I’ve been doing some little practice applications with sending and receiving data with the TcpClient and TcpListener class in C#. Now that I think I have a much better handle on how those work, it should be much easier to get over the hurdle I was stuck on with Fizzure.

Another goal I have is to make the Fizzure central server able to be split into nodes. Have different sections of all the XML data to be searched stored on different nodes. when a query comes in, the server sends a request to each node, each node searches the part of the data that it has stored and returns its results to the server, which than returns all of the results to the client. This seems more efficient than just having it all done by one computer, though because of network bandwidth, I don’t quite know if it would be in actuality.