etheus \e"the*us\ comes from the word Prometheus:
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Prometheus \Pro*me"the*us\, n. [L., fr. Gr. ?, from ? to have
forethought for.] (Class. Myth.)
The son of Iapetus (one of the Titans) and Clymene, fabled by
the poets to have surpassed all mankind in knowledge, and to
have formed men of clay to whom he gave life by means of fire
stolen from heaven. Jupiter, being angry at this, sent
Mercury to bind Prometheus to Mount Caucasus, where a vulture
preyed upon his liver.
[1913 Webster] Prominence
Prometheus was the host name given to a Linux file server in 2004. The server was primarily designed for storing and sharing multimedia content such as recorded television programmes, between a group of four students resident in a house in Loughborough. The concept was to produce an energy efficient means of allowing everyone in the house access to each other's shared files without requiring everyone to leave their computers on in their rooms. This was achieved using a dedicated server machine, built from new parts, with sufficient storage space for everyone's shared files. Naturally this machine ended up doing a lot more than this, including;
These services were all provided locally using multiple Gigabit ethernet cards with dedicated network connections for each computer.
The use of cheap Gigabit cards proved to be an expensive mistake. Under heavy loads, the cards were prone to latching-up, and several server crashes were suspected to be caused by these cards. The problem was eased by replacing the motherboard with a different type, however the system was still unstable under heavy network loads. After almost six months of use, the stability issues, over a period of a couple of days, suddenly became very severe. One network card was suspected as being faulty since it caused an instant server lockup when the link became active. Later examination of the cards indicated a general design fault since all cards had suffered discolouration of the PCB due to excessive heat produced by the main IC located in the centre of each card. Compounding these stability issues were the problems caused by experimentation with MythTV The problems were mainly caused by the use of very unstable graphics drivers, and flaky graphics hardware. The filesystem selected for this machine was the newly released Reiser4, which although very fast, had issues with NFSv4. At the time NFSv4 was also very experimental, and a significant ammount of time was devoted to setting up the associated services such as kerberos.
The main lessons learned from this exercise were not to use experimental or non-proven hardware/software in a production set-up. Cheap hardware is not guaranteed to be stable and well tested. New technologies are not always compliant, or even compatible with the standards they are supposed to support. Once a system is working reliably, leave it. As the old saying goes, if it ain't broke, don't fix it!
The etheus.net domain name was registered to aid the accessing of this system from remote locations. After two and a half years of service, urgent repairs were needed as the hard disks were showing signs of failure, which if had occurred, would have resulted in massive data loss due to the RAID striped configuration. In February 2007 the RAID0 array was replaced with a RAID5 array for improved immunity against hardware failure.
It is hoped one day that the content of an old website using the domain microtron.org.uk will be transferred to this Wiki for ease of maintainability.