New boxes available for QA

-hackers,

As I announced it a couple of months ago, apart from the boxes donated
to PostgreSQLFr (affected to the web team IIRC), Continuent also
donated 7 servers and a Gb/s switch to us for QA testing. It took some
time to set them up but they're now up and running and available.
These servers are available 24/7 to PostgreSQL QA and won't be used
for other purposes.

The servers are mostly P4 2.8-3 GHz with 512 to 3 GB of RAM and SATA
disk(s) and they are running CentOS 5.

The purposes I had in mind when I asked these servers to Robert Hodges
were to use them for:
- running buildfarm animals with unusual options: perhaps another box
with -DCLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS or the recent --disable-integer-datetimes
option and virtually any future options we'd like to test (Tom, any
thoughts?) - feel free to ask and I can give people access if they
want to be able to set up the animals by themselves (Andrew?);
- running benchfarm clients the day we'll have a benchfarm;
- give (well-known) people of the community who don't have access to
several servers the ability to perform tests on this platform
(depending on how many servers we dedicate to the 2 above points).
I'm open to any suggestions as they are really here to serve the
community and I'd really like to use them for any sort of QA possible.

Concerning the second point, I wonder if it's not worth it to have a
very simple thing already reporting results as the development cycle
for 8.4 has already started (perhaps several pgbench unit tests
testing various type of queries with a daily tree). Thoughts?

The good news is that we will add a couple of new boxes to this
platform soon. These "new" servers are dual Xeon boxes with more than
2GB RAM (from 2 to 4) and SCSI/SAS disks. We also have a quad Xeon MP
2.2 GHz box and a quad Xeon MP 700 Mhz which may be affected to the
project if we really need them (I know sometimes people are looking
for slow multi processors boxes so the quad Xeon 700 box may be a good
choice) - they are huge 6U boxes so if we don't need them for specific
purposes, I prefer affecting 1U boxes to the community. If we need
them, it's the good moment to ask for them. The new boxes are donated
by Cityvox.

All these boxes are hosted in Villeurbanne, France by Open Wide, the
company I work for.

I'm looking forward to your comments and ideas.

Regards,

--
Guillaume