From Many Computers To One Host

[Nepheligenous]

Hi,
I'm a Maintenance Technician working in a mail presorting facility. They have 12 sorting machines that have an average of 3 computers each, two of them having 7 computers. I keep looking at all those computers and wonder if it has been a waste of the company's money.
Here's how a sorting machine operates:
The mailpiece is fed into the machine. It passes in front of the first camera that takes a picture of the front of the mailpiece. The information is sent to a "Frame Grabber" which deciphers all the characters in the address block. After the characters have been deciphered, a database is accessed and the zipcode determined. This information is sent to the main computer (the Sort computer).
The Sort computer sends the zipcode to a barcode printer which is about 4 feet away from the first camera. The barcode is sprayed and then feedback is sent back to the Sort computer to verify that it has sprayed the barcode.
Just under a foot away from the barcode printer is a verifier, which is a camera that reads the barcode that was sprayed by the printer. It reads the barcode and sends this information back to the Sort computer which sends the information to computers that are located along the length of the machine so that the mailpiece an be placed in the correct bin.
The sort compuer as well as the "Frame Grabber" are Windows based.
I was wondering if they could replace all these Windows-based computers with one central UNIX host and have all the machines hooked up to it. Can the UNIX host computer keep up with all this input? Each machine is capable of processing roughly 30,000 pieces of mail per hour.
I know it would save them a lot of money and a LOT of headaches (Windows-based headaches, of course!)

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Vic

 

[franklin97355]

I'd just leave well enough alone. First you have the speed issue then who is going to write the new software?

 

[stefanwagner]

How many zip-codes are possible?
In germany, we have 100.000 different possibilities.
How big is a barcode for a zipcode?
If not too big, they should fit easily into memory, leading to fast response.

Do they have the source-codes?
Is it perhaps written in Java?

If one machine is broken, they have still 11 working sets.
More small machines may be cheaper than a single big one...

seeking a job as java-programmer in Berlin:

http://home.arcor.de/hirnstrom/bewerbung

 

[manarth]

Hooking all the machines up to one central host throws away all your redundancy: if that host crashes / suffers a hardware failure, you're back to hand sorting.

Besides, if it ain't broke, don't fix it....is there a problem at the moment?

<marc> i wonder what will happen if i press this...[ul][li]please tell us if our suggestion has helped[/li][li]need some help? faq581-3339[/li][/ul]

 

[Nepheligenous]

Hi,
Thanks for the responses. You are all correct, of course: if it's working now, then why mess with it? There are a few problems that made me think of centralized control of the computers:

1. The machine operators are minimum-wage employees and have zero computer training and knowledge. Most of them don't even care about the job they're doing, they are more concerned about making ends meet (who isn't?). I have great sympathy for them, but costly mistakes are made and jobs that should be finished in a matter of hours can take a whole day because they have to be rerun (due to incorrect rates being applied, etc.)

2. One of the three computers is a Linux box which is responsible for communication between photocells and Sort computer. It essentially connects all the hardware (virtually). This Linux box interfaces with the other two Windows XP boxes, and I think that's where the problem lies. The Windows computers are constantly freezing up, which drags down production. On the average, 8-10 mailpieces are processed per second and a 5 minute rebooting process can be very costly.

Reading the responses to this post, perhaps it IS best to leave things alone. I was just wondering if UNIX/Linux could be used exclusively as opposed to using (almost) 50 computers. Software development would be very expensive and a crashed host would shut things down in no time flat.

Thank you all for your kind attention to my post.

Vic

 

[stefanwagner]

Well - when porting the ~45 programs to linux is possible, you could replace the 45 win-boxes with 45 linux-boxes of course.

seeking a job as java-programmer in Berlin:

http://home.arcor.de/hirnstrom/bewerbung