Cynic

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Deceased Hardware

Cynic ~ 136.206.15.23

Details

Type:Sun Fire 280R
OS:OpenBSD 4.4
CPU:2 x 750MHz UltraSPARC III CPUs
RAM:2GB
Storage:2 x 36GB SCSI disks in RAID 1
Drives:DVD-ROM drive
Network:Sun Quad Fast Ethernet
Extras:RSC card
The Name:The name was chosen by the person who donated the machine (gliceas@rb). Receive wanted to call it toaster for a while.

Description

Paul Gargan (gliceas@rb) kindly donated this machine to RedBrick during 2007. It initially ran Solaris 10, but we encountered so many problems with this that we gave up and put Debian on it. Debian ran perfectly on the sun4u architecture. A while later we decided that Cynic should be the firewall/services machine for the VM network, and that it should run OpenBSD.

The machine's high availability features (specifically the RSC) and the fair amount of CPU power make it ideal for some sort of important position on the network.

During the Summer of 2010, it started acting up. Initially it powered itself off, the RSC said it was a failure (AC) of PSU1, the machine does, however have a redundant PSU and one PSU failure should not cause it to power off. It was powered on again and about a week later the same thing happened, except this time it was complaining about PSU2, suggesting some other hardware failure. It was then deemed too unreliable to remain in service. It's routing/firewally bits were temporarily handed off to sprout, while we tried to find a replacement, since a new PSU would cost enough to make not just replacing cynic silly. It was then consigned to the Redbrick scrap heap of history. It lay around in the admins way for a while, then returned to whence it came.

Services

  • DNS
  • Squid
  • Various firewall-related things