Alex came over this morning and we began work on the frame builder change over.  This required fb40m be brought down and disconnected from the RAID array, so the frame builder is not available.

He brought a Netgear switch which we've installed at the top of the 1X7 rack.  This will eventually be connected, via Cat 6 cable, to all the front ends.  It is connected to the new fb machine via a 10G fiber.

Alex has gone back to Downs to pickup a Symmetricon (sp?) card for getting timing information into the frame builder.  He will also be bringing back a harddrive with the necessary framebuilder software to be copied onto the new fb machine.

He said he'd like to also put a Gentoo boot server on the machine.  This boot server will not affect anything at the moment, but its apparently the style the sites are moving towards.  So you have a single boot server, and diskless front end computers, running Gentoo.  However for the moment we are sticking with our current Centos real time kernel (which is still compatible with the new frame builder code).  However this would make a switch over to the new system possible in the future.

At the moment, the RAID array is doing a file system check, and is going slowly while it checks terabytes of data.  We will continue work after lunch. 

 Punchline: things still don't work.