On Sunday 03 February 2008 21:18:50 Bob wrote:
> Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I have an unusual situation and problem at which I've been chipping
> > away. The base technology predates my IT experience.
> >
> > My wife is sensitive to what she describes as electromagnetic fields.
> > She gets headaches and other pains when exposed to equipment: the higher
> > the frequency, the worse her symptoms. For example, a VT is better than
> > a regular CRT connected to even a P-II-233 MHZ while a 486DX4-100 is
> > better than the P-II. Both are far better than my Athlon64 @3.5 GHz.
> > And any CRT is better than any LCD/plasma screen. Even my Palm Zire (I
> > think 233 MHz) with its ~2"x~3" screen is unsuitable within about 30
> > feet of her. She can't wear a digital watch.
>
> I'd get a modern ish server and underclock it, that way you'll be able
> to get more RAM and bigger hard drives, the Athlon XP was fairly easy to
> get down to 300 MHz with the FSB still @ 133, I never tried lower but I
> don't see why not, for comedy value see if you can get the CPU clocking
> lower than the RAM.

I've been following this discussion and you state that you want low-Mhz CPUs
but then you don't say anything about the other parts. Underclocking
a "modern-ish" computer would still give you faster bus speeds than an old
box.

Ditto for newer hard drives: you don't want a PATA-66, you want a PATA-33 -
unless it's /only/ the CPU that matters. I'm sure it's possible, but I find
it hard to convince myself that the CPU is the only part the matters - don't
the drives and buses. cards and cables emit EMF too?

Also, somewhere in another post you mentioned that using a server case might
help since it would have "fewer openings" (I assume you meant, as compared to
a PC). I don't believe that air-space has much effect on the EMF, only the
noise level. If a closed box fixes the problem, why don't you put the
computer in a metal box? As someone else mentioned, you could also try a
Faraday cage. Or maybe a lead container ;-)

The distance should have a radical effect too. If your wife says that it
bothers her the same amount no matter where in the house the computer sits, I
would say that either:

1. She's not telling the truth
2. It's not actually the EMF that's bothering her (maybe the noise frequencies
instead?)
3. Maybe it's causing an electrical disturbance in the household wiring
throughout the whole house
4. You have an insanely tiny house :-)

Have you had your house checked out by an electrician for any weird effects?
I've heard of people who had old or badly done wiring in their house that
caused strange electric fields to the point where it messed with appliances,
radios, and phones (cell and cordless). I'm sure it could mess with people
too.

Is your wife perfectly fine as long as the computer is off?

I have a friend who had to have the electric company come move the
transformer/pole away from the house because it was effecting her. She really
did start feeling better after it moved away. Have you taken your wife away -
say on vacation to a cabin in the mountains where there is no electricity at
all - to see if she feels much better away from it all?

Have you tried testing for magnetic or EMF fields yourself? Does a compass act
weird in your house? I'm not an electric expert but I know there are tools
that can pick up fields. Someone else mentioned an oscilloscope.

An electrician came to my house one day when I was a boy to repair something.
My mom mentioned that the florescent light in the dinning room seemed to be
bothering her eyes (we'd never had a florescent before). The electrician
started telling us how florescents put off tons of EMF (not to mention the
flicker). He took an electrical multi-tester - I'm talking about the kind
with two metal probes that you touch two metal parts with to see if you have
a circuit, measure resistance, etc - and just held the two probes up into the
air about 4 inches from the florescents (not touching anything) and they it
started to register electrical current out of the thin air! You can try it
yourself.

You've probably done all these things but I just thought I would ask.

JW

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Hello,

Thanks for your continuing interest, and for the interest of those new
to the thread. I'll summarize where things are at to avoid duplication.
Sorry if this gets a bit long. I'll also mark it OT since its not
Debian-specific.

Thanks,
Doug.

-----

The problem is real. There is no placebo effect to worry about.

Currently, Athlon64 box is as far from my wife as possible (70 feet).
Based on our experience of other high-MHz or GHz devices, she would have
to be at least 250 - 500 feet away. To avoid this problem, we have to
stay below 200 MHz if at all possible. Unfortunatly, this represents a
huge divide in available systems. If she could tolerate a 233 or 266
MHz system there would be no problem finding a suitable box.

We intend to keep the Athlon for graphic-intensive applications but only
on an as-needed basis, not as the main home computer.

Slow boxes are getting harder and harder to find so the one we want will
have to meet not just current needs (ours and the OS's) but future needs
as well. This drives the following criteria.

PCI bus: in the future, may need different or replacement drive HBAs
which aren't available (as of today on eBay) for sbus (sun systems e.g.
SparcStation 20). Also, many of the old boxes didn't have USB which is
an important connectivity bus to have now. Would like to be able to
drop in a USB card.

Drives: SCSI. Bioses of the vintage we're dealing with may not accept a
modern huge (even 70 GB) PATA drive when at the time of manufacture,
drives were 9 GB or less. Ultra-640 scsi has a clock of 160 MHz with
lesser scsi busses much lower. SATA is either 1.5 Gb/s or 3.0 Gb/s
which suggests a clock rate somewhere around the same and far above 200
MHz.

Number of drive bays: The box will be in use for years. If you
extrapolate the storage capacity of when these boxes were made (9 GB per
drive, for total of 9-36 GB for a workstation or 72-108 GB or more for a
server) and compare it with a typical home system today; compare the
storage space taken just with the OS and applications of 10 years ago
and today, then consider the future. Unless the box comes with a drive,
I'll put in a new scsi drive. When that one becomes full, I'll want to
add a second drive and not have to reinstall and restore from backup
over a 10 MB/s ethernet link from the Athlon64. Over time, I expect the
box to have a few drives of different capacities and ages.

Prefer server over workstation: Servers have more powerful fans since
they don't have to worry about noise as much. I've got a place I can
put it where it won't bother us. New scsi drives are at least 10KRPM.
I don't know how fast they were 10 years ago. They probably generate
more heat. I'd rather have a server with lots of bays and the fans to
keep them cool with a few new scsi drives and a few empty slots between
them than a workstation crammed with a couple of 10KRPM drives trying to
stay cool. Also, it may be that there is less radiated EMF from a
server with a metal case in a metal rack with metal doors than from a
workstation even if it has a metal case. Also, servers are more likely
to have more than one PCI bus. Workstations tend to have a bridged
single PCI bus. This gets important as drive speeds increase.

Memory: the more the merrier, especially during fscking of a big hard
drive. I've been told that at a minimum for fsck (to avoid swapping) I
should have 1 MB ram for every 1 GB drive. The box will be a file
server, and application server via ssh, for two users. If its a slow
box, some things may be done in batch mode (don't know what). Memory
footprint of software has been going up. Consider how it has increased
over the past 10 years. 10 years ago I was running OS/2 with
WordPerfect with 16 MB of ram. 3 years before that, OS/2 with
wordperfect with 2 MB of ram (at $1K per 1MB). What will it be in 10
years? That's what I want this box to be able to take (I know, I'll
never find a 10 year old server that can take 1 TB of ram ) Another
reason for server over workstation: servers had more ram.

CPUs. Would prefer SMP option but I know that current OS support of SMP
on old boxes is spotty at best.

I could take a server MB from a small server and put it into a larger
case (more bays, more fans, etc.).

The problem with underclocking is that there's more than the CPU to
consider. The whole I/O system has to work together; a modern box with
things underclocked will mean a mess of bus speeds that I haven't
investigated.

-----

Boxes and their limiting specs which I have looked into (in no
particular order).

AlphaServer 2100 min 250 Mhz

Sun SparcStation 20: mbus/sbus; workstation
Sun Ultra1 model 140: ditto
Sun Ultra1 model 170: ditto
Sun Ultra Enterprise 150: mbus/sbus.
Right now on eBay, can get sbus scsi HBAs, ethernet cards, and
graphic cards. No USB. Would not discount these just for USB.
Note that apparently, Sun drive bays are physically shorter and
need special hard drives, not off-the-shelf. I see this as a
major upgrade problem.

IBM servers of this vintage were RS/6000 PowerPC and are either not
supported or tricky and finicky to boot any of the free OSs.

IBM desktops: PC-300 series are available. Pentium 75-200 MHz. Only
room for one EIDE hard drive and poor cooling if I put in a large one
(assuming the BIOS accepts it).

HP-9000 J2240 workstation with room for 2 drives (BIOS will take 9 GB,
don't know about larger). 236 MHz.

HP/Compaq Proliant 5000. 200 MHz (may be available slower) is a
possibility at $300 USD on eBay plus shipping it across the border to
Canada. 2 PCI busses with 5 slots (2 shared with EISA), max 4 GB ram,
Pen Pro CPU, 5 bays in a rack-mount, 4 in a tower (may be other options
but I haven't got the manual for this unit).

HP/COmpaq Proliant 2500. 166 MHz Dual P. Pro. 1 PCI bus with 6 slots
(4 shared with EISA). Max 1 GB ram, 4 bays (plus two half-height) +
floppy + CDROM. Also a possibility at $300 USD on eBay.



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On Mon, Feb 04, 2008 at 03:43:34PM -0600, Jonathan Wilson wrote:
> On Sunday 03 February 2008 21:18:50 Bob wrote:
>
> > I'd get a modern ish server and underclock it, that way you'll be able
> > to get more RAM and bigger hard drives, the Athlon XP was fairly easy to
> > get down to 300 MHz with the FSB still @ 133, I never tried lower but I
> > don't see why not, for comedy value see if you can get the CPU clocking
> > lower than the RAM.
>
> I've been following this discussion and you state that you want low-Mhz CPUs
> but then you don't say anything about the other parts. Underclocking
> a "modern-ish" computer would still give you faster bus speeds than an old
> box.
>

Well, short of underclocking, if you get an old box with a slow CPU, you
get a slow-enough PCI bus. They didn't have PCI-e and SATA back then.
Lets say that would rather have nothing that is clocked above 200 MHz.
OTOH, who knows what speed the controller in a new SCSI drive is
running.

> Ditto for newer hard drives: you don't want a PATA-66, you want a PATA-33 -
> unless it's /only/ the CPU that matters. I'm sure it's possible, but I find
> it hard to convince myself that the CPU is the only part the matters - don't
> the drives and buses. cards and cables emit EMF too?
>

Well, a 66 MHz would be fine. Looking at the wikipedia article on SCSI
shows that ultra 320 would be fine.

> Also, somewhere in another post you mentioned that using a server case might
> help since it would have "fewer openings" (I assume you meant, as compared to
> a PC). I don't believe that air-space has much effect on the EMF, only the
> noise level. If a closed box fixes the problem, why don't you put the
> computer in a metal box? As someone else mentioned, you could also try a
> Faraday cage. Or maybe a lead container ;-)
>

Well, a server in a rack with doors counts as a metal box. A desktop in
a metal box needs careful cooling design. Makes it into a server case.
What I mean is that a desktop/workstation has lots of openings where you
can see right onto the MB. If the opening is big enough, the RF can get
out. On a server, I think that there are internal metal parts
between any openings and the MB.

[snip topics covered in other emails]

> Have you had your house checked out by an electrician for any weird effects?
> I've heard of people who had old or badly done wiring in their house that
> caused strange electric fields to the point where it messed with appliances,
> radios, and phones (cell and cordless). I'm sure it could mess with people
> too.
>

House has been fully inspected by safety authority and I have verified
every connection point at every device, checked for grounded neutrals,
etc. The problem is also not specific to our house. She has problems
in other buildings with computers and outside near e.g. laptops, flat
panel screens in restraunts, near people with digital cameras, cell
phones, etc.

> Is your wife perfectly fine as long as the computer is off?
>

> I have a friend who had to have the electric company come move the
> transformer/pole away from the house because it was effecting her. She really
> did start feeling better after it moved away. Have you taken your wife away -
> say on vacation to a cabin in the mountains where there is no electricity at
> all - to see if she feels much better away from it all?

20 miles North East of Kirkland Lake in Ontario is Esker Lakes
Provincial Park. No hydro to the camp sites. Nearest cell tower is
Kirkland lake. Park's only phone hook up is via a 100' tower with a
directional cell antenna for the parks two phone lines (phone +
internet/credit-card/fax). Hand-held or 5Watt bag phones have not hope.
Wife is fine there, except near the park office or front gate (where the
computers are).

>
> Have you tried testing for magnetic or EMF fields yourself? Does a compass act
> weird in your house? I'm not an electric expert but I know there are tools
> that can pick up fields. Someone else mentioned an oscilloscope.
>

I don't have a device like a spectrum analyzer for the GHz range. They
are very expensive. No fixed magnetic anomolies that I can find around
the house. Kingston harbour area (25 Km south-east of us) has a known
magnetic anomoly that is considered a hazard to marine navigation.
We're on the boundary where sedementary bedrock abuts the precambrian
(Canadian) shield.

> An electrician came to my house one day when I was a boy to repair something.
> My mom mentioned that the florescent light in the dinning room seemed to be
> bothering her eyes (we'd never had a florescent before). The electrician
> started telling us how florescents put off tons of EMF (not to mention the
> flicker). He took an electrical multi-tester - I'm talking about the kind
> with two metal probes that you touch two metal parts with to see if you have
> a circuit, measure resistance, etc - and just held the two probes up into the
> air about 4 inches from the florescents (not touching anything) and they it
> started to register electrical current out of the thin air! You can try it
> yourself.
>

Sure. We don't have florescents, nor even halogens. Plain ordinary
(soon to be discontinued) incandescant. Analog radio is fine (IIRC,
intermediate frequency of 155 MHz).


Thanks,

Doug.


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A Blue and White G3 will happily boot and run the latest Debian
releases (Etch or Lenny). The Beige G3s (which may have slightly
lower MHz ratings [233 for Beige vs 300 for the B&W]) will run Sarge
OK once booted -- I haven't tried Etch or Lenny, but they need a bit
of TLC to get them to boot Linux in the first place. Mail me offline
if you decide to give this a try. I'll try to help.


There are even older Macs with sub 200MHz CPUs, but you will probably
find them too limited in the amount of RAM they can take.



Rick


On Feb 4, 2008, at 2:55 PM, Kelly Harding wrote:


PPC Macs are getting a fair bit cheap these days, and are quite easy
to upgrade, the G4s start around 400Mhz though. G3s you can get at
around 233Mhz, a Beige G3 with a G3/233mhz cpu should handle linux ok,
though they're a bit of a tempermental machine really ime. Blue &
White G3s are the better bet really for G3s. As the CPUs are ZIF
socketed, you can add faster or slower G3 cpus to them. They'll take a
few hard drives too without a problem. Never personally tried Linux on
PPC/Mac as I've always found OS X to meet my needs.



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On Tue, Feb 05, 2008 at 12:28:51AM -0500, Rick Thomas wrote:
>
> A Blue and White G3 will happily boot and run the latest Debian
> releases (Etch or Lenny). The Beige G3s (which may have slightly
> lower MHz ratings [233 for Beige vs 300 for the B&W]) will run Sarge
> OK once booted -- I haven't tried Etch or Lenny, but they need a bit
> of TLC to get them to boot Linux in the first place. Mail me offline
> if you decide to give this a try. I'll try to help.
>
> There are even older Macs with sub 200MHz CPUs, but you will probably
> find them too limited in the amount of RAM they can take.
>

Yes, thanks. I need sub-200 MHz and lots of ram.


>
> Rick
>
>
> On Feb 4, 2008, at 2:55 PM, Kelly Harding wrote:
>
> >PPC Macs are getting a fair bit cheap these days, and are quite easy
> >to upgrade, the G4s start around 400Mhz though. G3s you can get at
> >around 233Mhz, a Beige G3 with a G3/233mhz cpu should handle linux ok,
> >though they're a bit of a tempermental machine really ime. Blue &
> >White G3s are the better bet really for G3s. As the CPUs are ZIF
> >socketed, you can add faster or slower G3 cpus to them. They'll take a
> >few hard drives too without a problem. Never personally tried Linux on
> >PPC/Mac as I've always found OS X to meet my needs.
>
>
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 02/04/08 22:44, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
[snip]
>
> The problem is real. There is no placebo effect to worry about.
>
> Currently, Athlon64 box is as far from my wife as possible (70 feet).
> Based on our experience of other high-MHz or GHz devices, she would have
> to be at least 250 - 500 feet away. To avoid this problem, we have to

If you live in an urban or suburban area, you *probably live less
than 75m from your neighbors and their high-MHz PC, and *definitely*
150m from them.

Besides, EM radiation drops in intensity with the square of the
distance.

How does she walk across the street, under the power-lines?

Or stand it when the neighbor turns on the microwave oven?

Are you stocking up on incandescent bulbs? They'll be going away
"soon".

[big snippage]
>
> -----
>
> Boxes and their limiting specs which I have looked into (in no
> particular order).
>
> AlphaServer 2100 min 250 Mhz

God those are ancient... We had those back in the mid-1990s.

[snip]

- --
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA USA

PETA - People Eating Tasty Animals
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 02/04/08 23:03, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
[snip]
>
> Sure. We don't have florescents, nor even halogens. Plain ordinary
> (soon to be discontinued) incandescant. Analog radio is fine (IIRC,
> intermediate frequency of 155 MHz).

Visible light is 100,000GHz and infrared is 10,000GHz. Ultraviolet
is even higher. How does she survive?

- --
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA USA

PETA - People Eating Tasty Animals
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Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
> Sure. We don't have florescents, nor even halogens. Plain ordinary
> (soon to be discontinued) incandescant.

Halogens are incandescents. They just use a bit of chemistry to run hotter
than ordinary incandescents.

Ron Johnson writes:
> Visible light is 100,000GHz and infrared is 10,000GHz. Ultraviolet is
> even higher.

And everything at a temperature above absolute zero emits radiation at all
wavelengths.

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On Tue, Feb 05, 2008 at 07:16:06AM -0600, Ron Johnson wrote:
> On 02/04/08 22:44, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
> [snip]
> >
> > The problem is real. There is no placebo effect to worry about.
> >
> > Currently, Athlon64 box is as far from my wife as possible (70 feet).
> > Based on our experience of other high-MHz or GHz devices, she would have
> > to be at least 250 - 500 feet away. To avoid this problem, we have to
>
> If you live in an urban or suburban area, you *probably live less
> than 75m from your neighbors and their high-MHz PC, and *definitely*
> 150m from them.

Well, we're in farm country, The houses are 70' from the edge of the
road. Our nearest neighbour is across the street: 70' + 70' + 40' =
170' to their front door plus however far to their microwave and PC. It
is a factor over which I have little controll. I do have control over
my own server.

>
> Besides, EM radiation drops in intensity with the square of the
> distance.
>
> How does she walk across the street, under the power-lines?
>

With a head ache, of course.

> Or stand it when the neighbor turns on the microwave oven?
>



> Are you stocking up on incandescent bulbs? They'll be going away
> "soon".
>

It will be a few years.

> [big snippage]
> >
> > -----
> >
> > Boxes and their limiting specs which I have looked into (in no
> > particular order).
> >
> > AlphaServer 2100 min 250 Mhz
>
> God those are ancient... We had those back in the mid-1990s.
>

I write this sitting at a Digital VT 520.

Right. Its ancient, mid-1990's technology for which I am looking. One
that will take the memory and drives to handle today's software and
data-set size. Unfortunatly, that was during the shift from propriatary
busses to standardization on PCI. For example, by the time IBM RS/6000
PPC boxes used PCI, they were just over 200 MHz. They were nice looking
boxes, able to keep three PCI busses busy: two full scsi busses feeding
two gigabit networks while running around 300 MHz with 4 PPCs. They
still command a high price. I've never heard of anyone having one die
on them.

Ron, what other ancient hardware do you remember that may be suitable.
I can browse eBay, search eg: "166 MHz -GHz" for each MHz about which I
am aware, but I can't do that for the wider Google-land. Are there big
server boxes that I am overlooking?

I'm also going to look into scsi drive holders in case I end up with a
server with few bays.

Thanks Ron,

Doug.


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On Tue, Feb 05, 2008 at 07:26:47AM -0600, Ron Johnson wrote:
> On 02/04/08 23:03, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
> [snip]
> >
> > Sure. We don't have florescents, nor even halogens. Plain ordinary
> > (soon to be discontinued) incandescant. Analog radio is fine (IIRC,
> > intermediate frequency of 155 MHz).
>
> Visible light is 100,000GHz and infrared is 10,000GHz. Ultraviolet
> is even higher. How does she survive?

Well, humans have their own half-decent sheilding for that. The skin
prevents UV damage to the nervous system beneath it, it also turns
infrared into heat which is cooled by the blood. The skull shields the
brain from most of this stuff and sunglasses when outside take care of
the rest.



OK, so my ancient box only has to be functional until we have
holographic computers with isolinear chips and data is stored in
hyperspace.



Seriously, I don't know what the upper limit on the range of troubling
frequencies are. It is higher than that found in consumer electronics
right now.

Doug.


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