[geeks] Hello, my name is Ken, and I am a...

[Tugrul Galatali]

On Tue, 8 May 2001, Ken Hansen wrote:

> This morning, on my way in to work, the town my office is in is having a "big pick-up" (this is when the trash man will take away anything *reasonable* left on the curb, i.e. no water heaters). On my short jaunt through town I counted no less than 5 IBM XT/AT clones stacked next to various trash piles, and I was tempted to stop and take a look. There was also a Mac IIx (yes, I got close enough to see the model number)...
> 
> I have a problem.
> 

	I somehow managed to spot a RS/6000 in a heap of trash as the elevator
doors closed on the 3rd floor of the Math/CS building at NYU. I went back in
the evening hours and brought it back to the ACM office. Its labelled as a 
PowerServer 340, and it seems complete on the inside. I'm somewhat freaked I've
gotten to this point and I'm only 19 with minimal experience with random
hardware :) But those RS/6000s do have a distinctive color/texture =P

	Anyway, to the more important issue, what can I do with this monster.
There doesn't seem to be as much random information on the web about it as sun
boxen do. I'm not quite sure how to id the dual hard drives and their sizes,
although they look like Seagate Barracuda's, and from what I gather they are
probably 400MB each. The CPU is a 33Mhz POWER-2, which from some SPECint92
scores I found only puts out half the integer horse that my SM41s in my SS10
do. That must be damn slow. All 16 SIMM slots are full, so I assume there must
be at least 64MB in there. There is no video out of any sort, so I assume once
I manage to get the beast home, I'll hook it upto a serial console.
	The more pressing question is can these boxes do net boot/install like
sun boxes can. And anybody want to sneak me a copy of AIX 3.2.x or *cough*4.x
*cough* if it runs on this thing. The last time I saw AIX get installed was on 
a 320H off of a tape drive :( Luckily this guy has ethernet, even if its only 
AUI. Token Ring would have been a dead end at my house.
	(who the hell would want to leave an existing OS installation for a 
box from the dump? Wheres the fun in that :)

	Tugrul Galatali (who probably should be sound asleep after completing
his finals, but is curious about the box :)