This server has had an exciting couple of days. I did a kernel upgrade hoping to fix some USB related hardware conflicts, and after the upgrade it wouldn’t boot. After screwing around with the boot loader for a long time, I finally got it booted. But then my raided hard disks would not mount. I have most stuff working again, but there are definitely more problems than before the upgrade. I broke rule #1 and paid for it – never upgrade anything that is working.

Here is a bash script for acpi that underclocks the ati radeon 9700 on my laptop. Make sure to add an ac_adapter acpi event that calls the script:

#!/bin/bash

displaynum=0
user=`finger| grep -m1 ":$displaynum " | awk '{print $1}'`
echo $user
status=`acpi -a | grep on-line`
#echo $status
if [ "$status" ]
then
su $user -c "aticonfig --set-powerstate=3"
else
su $user -c "aticonfig --set-powerstate=1"
fi

Yesterday I went on a special tour of BlueGene/L and Purple, which are the fastest and third fastest supercomputers in the world. I saw several others as well. These are classified computers, so I was lucky to be able to see them because they are in a high security facility. They are amazing – BlueGene/L has 131,072 processors!