[HECnet] CODA replaced by CHARON

[Bob Armstrong]

  CODA is getting an early retirement.   It's a very nice machine (a DS20E)
but it uses nearly 500W and with the marginal electricity rate here in CA at
something like 38 cents/kWh that's about $140 per month to keep it running
24x7.   That's just too much, and I'm replacing it with a Charon-AXP-nce
emulation on a Linux box; it's the same Linux box we use for our MythTV
backend so it's already running 24x7 anyway.   The Charon emulation is only
about half the speed of the original DS20 (the CPU emulation is not bad, but
the emulated I/O performance seems crappy when compared with the real
hardware) so it'll be an experiment to see if it can keep up.

  The only real difference to HECnet is that people with Multinet
connections to me will see that they're now terminated by 2.17 CHARON rather
than 2.7 CODA.

  Johnny, please add 2.17 CHARON to the node database on MIM.

Thanks,
Bob