Today, I wanted to watch the progress of a long-running process (a backup) at the same time as I watched htop and slurm to keep an eye on performance values while it was running. My first thought was to figure out how to make screen cycle through different sessions automatically, every X seconds, like how many KVMs behave. Turns out there’s an even better solution. You can make screen operate split screen, so you can see multiple sessions all at once! Why oh why didn’t I take the time to discover this sooner?

1. Start screen.
2. Hit ctrl-a/shift-s to split the screen.
3. Hit ctrl-a/tab to switch to the other “screen”.
4. Hit ctrl-a/c to create a new session or ctrl-a/(screen #) to switch to an already running session.
5. Hit ctrl-a/shift-s to split the “screen” again if you like.

So this is what my screen session looks like now:
All the stuff I wanted to keep an eye visible at once. Awesome!

That’s right, according to this they will pay me $111.00 to take a SL500 off their hands. Woohoo!

Upon further digging it became clear that someone just botched the config for that system and got it listed with no components at all. Every category said “NA” and had no specs at all. The price quickly jumped up to normal levels once you started customizing and added, you know, actual parts to the machine. Too bad, I was gonna order a baker’s dozen…