Decommissioned Machines
2025
biloba
Dead, died after the poweroutage of May 9th, 2025, previously served as Cloudstack master node or wtv.
Supermicro server funded by SLEF for CSC web hosting. Located in DC 3558. TODO: rack??
Specs
- 2x Intel Xeon Gold 6140 @ 2.30GHz [18 cores each]
- 384GB RAM
- 12 3.5" Hot Swap Drive Bays
- 2 x 480 GB SSD
- 10GbE onboard, 10GbE SFP+ card (on loan from CSCF)
Services
- OpenStack Compute machine
Notes
- TODO: cloudstack migration
No longer in use:
- caffeine
- mattermost
Pre-2021
aspartame
aspartame was a taurine clone donated by CSCF. It was once our primary file server, serving as the gateway interface to space on phlogiston. It also used to host the auth1 container, which has been temporarily moved to dextrose. Decomissioned in March 2021 after refusing to boot following a power outage.
psilodump
psilodump is a NetApp FAS3000 series fileserver donated by CSCF. It, along with its sibling phlogiston, hosted disk shelves exported as iSCSI block devices.
psilodump was plugged into aspartame. It's still installed but inaccessible.
phlogiston
phlogiston is a NetApp FAS3000 series fileserver donated by CSCF. It, along with its sibling psilodump, hosted disk shelves exported as iSCSI block devices.
phlogiston is turned off and should remain that way. It is misconfigured to have its drives overlap with those owned by psilodump, and if it is turned on, it will likely cause irreparable data loss.
Specs
- 2 AMD Opteron 2218 CPUs
- 10GB RAM
Notes from before decommissioning
- The lxc files are still present and should not be started up, or else the two copies of auth1 will collide.
- It currently cannot route the 10.0.0.0/8 block to a misconfiguration on the NetApp. This should be fixed at some point.
glomag
Glomag hosted caffeine. Decommissioned April 6, 2018.
Specs
- Intel Xeon X3450 @ 2.67 GHz
- 6 GB RAM
- vg0: 465 GB software RAID1 (contains root partition):
- 750 GB Seagate Barracuda SATA hard drive
- 500 GB Western-Digital Caviar Blue SATA hard drive
- vg1: 596 GB software RAID1 (contains caffeine):
- 2 × 640 GB Western-Digital Caviar Blue SATA hard drive
Services
- Before its decommissioning, glomag hosted caffeine, mail, and munin as Linux containers
Lisp machine
A Symbolics XL1200 Lisp machine. Donated to a new home when we couldn't get it working.
http://www.globalnerdy.com/2008/12/03/symbolics-xl1200-lisp-machine-free-to-a-good-home/ for some history on this hardware.
Specs
Currently inoperable due to (at least) a missing console cable.
ginseng
Ginseng used to be our fileserver, before aspartame and the netapp took over.
Specs
- Intel Pentium Dual Core E2180
- 8GB RAM
- Intel S3000AHV Motherboard
- 4 × 640 GB Western-Digital Caviar Blue in RAID 10 behind a 3ware 9650SE RAID card.
calum
Calum used to be our main server and was named after Calum T Dalek. Purchased new by the club in 1994.
Specs
- SPARCserver 10 (headless SPARCstation 10)
paza
An iMac G3 that was used as a dumb terminal.
Specs
- 233Mhz PowerPC 740/750
- 96 MB RAM
romana
Romana was a BeBox that has been in the CSC's possession since long before BeOS became defunct.
Confirmed on March 19th, 2016 to be fully functional. An SSHv1 compatible client was installed from http://www.abstrakt.ch/be/ and a compatible firewalled daemon was started on Sucrose (living in /root, prefix is /root/ssh-romana). The insecure daemon is to be used a bastion host to jump to hosts only supporting >=SSHv2. The mail daemon on the BeBox has also been configured to send mail through mail.csclub.uwaterloo.ca.
Specs
- 2 PowerPC based processors
- Stylish Blinken processor-load lights
sodium-citrate
Sodium-citrate was an SGI O2 machine.
In order to net boot you need to set /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_no_pmtu_disc to 1. When the O2 boots, hit F5 at the boot menu and type bootp():.
Specs
- SGI O2 MIPS processor
- 423 MB (?) RAM
- 2 × 2 GB hard drive
acesulfame-potassium
An old office terminal.
Specs
- Intel Pentium 4 2.67GHz
- 1GB RAM
- ABIT VT7 Motherboard
- ATI Radeon 7000
skynet
skynet was a Sun E6500 machine donated by Sanjay Singh. It was never fully set up.
Specs
- 15 full CPU/memory boards
- 2x UltraSPARC II 464MHz / 8MB Cache Processors
- ??? RAM?
- 1 I/O board (type=???)
- ???x disks?
- 1 CD-ROM drive
freebsd
FreeBSD was a virtual machine with FreeBSD installed.
Services
- Newer software
rainbowdragoneyes
Rainbowdragoneyes was our Lemote Fuloong MIPS machine. This machine is aliased to rde.csclub.uwaterloo.ca.
Specs
- 800MHz MIPS Loongson 2f CPU
denardo
Due to some instability, general uselessness, and the acquisition of a more powerful SPARC machine from MFCF, denardo was decommissioned in February 2015.
Specs
- Sun Fire V210
- TI UltraSparc IIIi (Jalapeño)
- 2 GB RAM
- 160 GB RAID array
- ALOM on denardo-alom.csclub can be used to power machine on/off
artificial-flavours
Artificial-flavours was our secondary (backup services) server. It used to be an office terminal. It was decommissioned in February 2015 and transferred to the ownership of Women in Computer Science (WiCS).
Specs
- Intel Celeron 3.2GHz
- 2GB RAM
- Biostar P4M80-M4 Motherboard
- Western-Digital 80 GB ATA hard drive
potassium-citrate
Potassium-citrate is a dual-processor Alpha machine. It is on extended loan from pbarfuss.
It is temporarily decommissioned pending the reinstallation of a supported operating system (such as OpenBSD).
Specs
- Alphaserver CS20 (2 833MHz EV68al CPUs)
- 512MB RAM
- 36 GB Seagate SCSI hard drive
potassium-nitrate
This was a Sun Fire E2900 from a decommissioned MFCF compute cluster. It had a SPARC architecture and ran OpenBSD, unlike many of our other systems which are x86/x86-64 and Linux/Debian. After multiple unsuccessful attempts to boot a modern Linux kernel and possible hardware instability, it was determined to be non-cost-effective and non-effort-effective to put more work into running this machine. The system was reclaimed by MFCF where someone from CS had better luck running a suitable operating system (probably Solaris).
The name is from saltpetre, because sparks.
Specs
- 24 CPUs
- 90GB main memory
- 400GB scratch disk local storage in /scratch-potassium-nitrate
There is a setup guide available for this machine.
See also Sun 2900.
taurine
Note: On August 21, 2019, just before 2:30PM EDT, we were informed that taurine caught fire. As a result, taurine has been decommissioned as of Fall 2019.
Specs
- 2 AMD Opteron 2218 CPUs
- 8GB RAM
- 136 GB LVM volume group
Services
- Virtual machines
- BitlBee IRC instant messaging gateway (localhost only)
- ident server to maintain high connection cap to freenode
- Runs ssh on ports 21,22,53,80,81,443,8000,8080 for user's convenience.
dextrose
dextrose was a taurine clone donated by CSCF and was decommissioned in Fall 2019 after being replaced with a more powerful server.
sucrose
sucrose was a taurine clone donated by CSCF. It was decommissioned in Fall 2019 following multiple hardware failures.
goto80
Note (2022-10-25): This seems to have gone missing or otherwise left our hands.
This was small ARM machine we picked up in order to have similar hardware to the Real Time Operating Systems (CS 452) course. It has a JTAG interface. Located was the office on the top shelf above strombola.
Specs
- 500 MHz Feroceon (ARM926ej-s compatible) processor
- ARMv5TEJ architecture
Use -march=armv5te -mtune=arm926ej-s options to GCC.
For information on the TS-7800's hardware see here: http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/board-detail.php?product=ts-7800
nullsleep
nullsleep is an ASRock ION 330 machine given to us by CSCF and funded by MEF.
It's decommissioned on 2023-03-20 due to repeated unexpected shutdown. Replaced by powernap.
Specs
- Intel® Dual Core Atom™ 330
- 2GB RAM
- NVIDIA® ION™ graphics
- 1x 64GB SanDisk SDSSDP064G SSD
- DVD Burner
Speakers
Nullsleep has the office speakers (a pair of nice studio monitors) currently connected to it.
Services
Nullsleep runs MPD for playing music. Control of MPD is available only to users in the "audio" group. Music is located in /music on the office terminal
bit-shifter
bit-shifter was an office terminal, decommissioned April 2023 due to extended age. It was upgraded to the same specs as Strombola at an unknown point in time.
Specs
- Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q8300
- 4GB RAM
- Nvidia GeForce GT 440
- Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3L Motherboard
- 1x 64GB SanDisk SDSSDP064G SSD
- Jacob Parker's Firewire Card
Services
strombola
Strombola was an office terminal named after Gordon Strombola. It was retired in April 2023.
Specs
- Intel Pentium G4600 2 cores @ 3.6Ghz
- 8 GB RAM
- 1x 64GB SanDisk SDSSDP064G SSD
Speakers
Strombola used to have integrated 5.1 channel sound before we got new speakers and moved audio stuff to nullsleep.
gwem
gwem was an office terminal that was created because AMD donated a graphics card. It entered CSC service in February 2012.
Specs
- AMD FX-8150 3.6GHz 8-Core CPU
- 16 GB RAM
- AMD Radeon 6870 HD 1GB GPU
- Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD7 Motherboard
- 1x 64GB SanDisk SDSSDP064G SSD
maltodextrin
(*specs are outdated at least as of 2023-05-27*)
- Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3L Motherboard
Maltodextrin was an office terminal. It was upgraded in Spring 2014 after an unidentified failure. Not operational (no video output) as of July 2022.
Specs
- Intel Core i3-4130 @ 3.40 GHz
- 8GB RAM
- 1x 64GB SanDisk SDSSDP064G SSD
- ASUS H81-PLUS Motherboard
Services
natural-flavours
Natural-flavours is an office terminal; it used to be our mirror.
In Fall 2016, it received a major upgrade thanks the MathSoc's Capital Improvement Fund.