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Last modified December 08 2008 17:37:58
About Machines
The machine you see on the photo is my provisional server (in 2000). (at the time the photo was taken it was provisional because the motherboard (an Abit BE6-II) had been burned and I was waiting for a new one. Today I have it back but not yet a new photo... 
It is a Pentium III 550MHz with 512 MB RAM and a RAID 5 System of 4 IBM 20GB Harddrives on a UDMA 66 Controller HPT366, the builtin one from the Abit motherboard, but I used the Abit HotRod as well) and an Seagate 3 GB for the system files. The RAID is a software RAID and it is running now since January 2000, so yes, it's damn stable! I used the epxerimental patches for the Linux kernel 2.2 and upgraded to 2.4 without any problems... It is based on RedHat 6.1 (but many packages updated/new compiled, in fact it is now completely synced with RedHat Update, which is at the time of updating about RedHat 7.3, so yes, updating old machines IS possible, but you should do it all the time slowly not 6.1 to 7.3 in one task...). Apt for RPM really rocks and it is now in daily use for months! The machine serves as file/web/database/ftp/whatever-Server and firewall/router in my small home lan. The main reason for having a server here is that I need to play something around with and to be able to test everything out, especially the software I write... The machines also acts as WLAN access point by using the HostAP drivers (you can find RPMs in my ExtRPMs apt repository). This works pretty good and my uni friends really like that :-) The server is connected to five networks (LAN at university home, home vi IPSec secured VPN, AP WLAN, WLAN to a friend and to a computing center via IPSec)... The average uptime is about 50 days, then either power decides to go down for two seconds or I decide to upgrade the kernel ;-) My workstation is a Pentium 4 at 2.4 GHz with 512 MB RAM and a IBM DTLA 30 GB EIDE drive. It has a NVidia Geforce 2 for the funnier sides of life and to test the newest 3D-stuff from friends ;-) The system runs under RedHat Linux 9 with some updates and extra stuff. I use GNOME as Desktop Environment. At home (I'm living in my university city now, so home means "real home base" :-) I run my old Celern 433 192 MB of RAM and a 6 Gig SCSI harddrive as router box under RedHat Linux. It does a nice job and uptime is growing... It does other jobs as well like proxying and content filtering. I use RedHat since it is very easy to maintain and I'm used to it. Debian's apt is nice too, but right now I'm stuck with RedHat :-) And don't say an old Pentium is not worth a penny any more, it still runs an Apache with mod_ssl and PHP, an IRC bot for my brother and so on... This ran on an old Pentium 166 before but that machine really got old... I also have a Notebook. It's a Dell Latitude C600 with a Mobile Pentium III 700, 512 MB of RAM and a 20 Gig harddrive and integrated LAN/Modem. But the modem does not run under Linux :-( The LAN runs perfectly though. It's really cool and I can do all my work on the train when going home ;-). I also bought a WLAN PC-Card on HAL 2001 (the coolest event ever, really awesome!). It's a Lucent Orinoco Gold and it really rocks! Although it was trouble to get it working it the gave me 450 KByte connections to the internet on a heavy traffic WLAN with the OLD drivers... Now I need a second one to use it @home ;-) I have a smaller test machine (Pentium II 300) for experiments. It usually does not run the same OS as in the week before :-) It's a really experimental machine with 128 MB of RAM and SCSI on board. I couldn't use it anymore in my workstation since the AGP port cannot give the Voodoo enough power... This machine has now been annexed by my parents so that they finally use a computer. Linux does a pretty good job on giving them an easy to use and (almost) undestroyable environment they can play with... |
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