Trading Folding Points

[shatteredsilicon]

I know this may sound lame to some (most?), but is anyone interested in trading points at or near electricity costs? I'm quite surprised that I've been unable to find any current eBay auctions for folding points, considering there are plenty for various MMORPG game items being traded, and this isn't all that much different.

If there is interest in such things, they perhaps have a separate forum section for it?

Let the flames begin. ;-)

[MikeTimbers]

I have heard of this but never seen it. We have a collective account here - Unimatrix_Zero - but most folders prefer to have unique accounts which perhaps reflects the stats are more important than the science. That would suggest that there might be folders intersted in paying for points but I can't imagine there being folders who would crunch for someone else!

Just my $0.02.

[shatteredsilicon]

I'll happily sell mine. :-)

[MikeTimbers]

whore :p

[shatteredsilicon]

whore :p

Well, if there's demand, supply will appear. :)

[MikeTimbers]

So did you sell them? Your personal production appears to have dropped to zero?

[shatteredsilicon]

So did you sell them? Your personal production appears to have dropped to zero?

Sadly, no.

I've had rather implausible hardware failures. I've had a RAID1 stripe go belly up with both disks suffering massive failure. I had the data volume mirrored to 3 other machines so I've lost no data, but I've lost the OS volume, which wasn't replicated (why would it be, it was on a mirrored stripe, right?).

So, while the disks are on their way to get RMA-ed (sent them off on Friday, so the supplier will have them on Tuesday), I decided to "make some lemonade" (all one can do with lemons), and made the main folding rig work by PXE-booting an NFS-root off one of the servers. The upshot is that this works really, shockingly well over gigabit ethernet. If anything performance seems better most of the time, because although the worst case is worse by about 0.1ms (gigabit ping time), the average case is much improved because everything is cached server-side, so the 8ms disk access time is almost completely avoided.

Sadly, this also yielded greater stress to other things, especially memory, so my highly tuned settings turned out to suddenly be woefully unstable, despite passing days of heavy stress testing with no problems in the past. It turns out that Patriot DDR3 memory just will not work according to it's spec. (If you're contemplating it because timings look fast and it looks cheap - forget it - it just won't work at the settings claimed - buy OCZ, Corsair or Crucial and save yourself days of pain and testing only to wonder what's unstable when everything is 100% in spec.)

So anyway, back up and running now, just about. I hope my new Q6600 isn't throwing up errors (going to fit it this week), or I'm going to go nuts with all the hardware problems. So far in this machine I've replaced the CPU and 2 disks, and the memory isn't working at rated speed. That pretty much leaves the GPUs and the motherboard that haven't failed (yet at least). Crazy. Quality of consumer grade parts is absolutely dire these days.

[MikeTimbers]

Ah, I wondered why your points had gone down. I lost my OS on Sunday on my Q6600; it would start in safe mode but not at all in normal mode. I hate re-installing but there wasn't an alternative. Then yesterday, I decided to re-plumb the cooling so that took most of the day. Then I turned it all back on to test it but had one of the drives in my RAID3 array unplugged so that demanded to be rebuilt too.

Oh the humanity.

[shatteredsilicon]

Then I turned it all back on to test it but had one of the drives in my RAID3 array unplugged so that demanded to be rebuilt too.

RAID3? Dude, that's so early '90s. What's wrong with RAID5?

[MikeTimbers]

I know but hear me out. The array is controlled by an XFX REVO64 hardware RAID controller which costs around $20 but crucially emulates a standard IDE controller to the OS so with it being independent of the motherboard means you can move it to another motherboard and it will still work.

Review (http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=1366&page=1)

[shatteredsilicon]

I know but hear me out. The array is controlled by an XFX REVO64 hardware RAID controller which costs around $20 but crucially emulates a standard IDE controller to the OS so with it being independent of the motherboard means you can move it to another motherboard and it will still work.

Review (http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=1366&page=1)

Fair. :)