[geeks] Say you wanted to...

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

On Mon, 9 Apr 2007 02:38:57 -0500
Bill Bradford <mrbill at mrbill.net> wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 09, 2007 at 12:22:20AM -0400, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> > > I *threw away* ten 9G drives in Sun spud brackets (along with the rest
> > > of the D1000) two weeks ago when I couldn't get anyone to come take it
> > > off my hands.
> > I can't imagine you throwing them away if they were any good.
> 
> They were perfectly fine, in excellent working order.  The D1000 worked
> fine too.

Oh, I can see the D1000 being too hard to handle, but I'd probably have kept
the 9GB drives if they were good.

I have some right now in a stack, but they are the wrong kind for the
machines I have which need them.

> I've got a couple of Ultra 10s (that I personally own) at work, one with

I don't like the 10s.  The 60 and 80 is more interesting to me, if I could
get drive for them anyway.

Alternately, if someone would make a SATA controller that would work for them.

That would actually pump new life into those machines, since they are
generally fast enough for a lot of work, but paying $125 for a small drive
for them is crazy.

> 1G RAM and SCSI DVDROM/HD, the other with 768M and IDE, that are getting 
> near the "if nobody wants these, they're going with the next scrap run"
> stage.  Originally the all-SCSI box was my Solaris10 testbed, but I get 
> just as good results from a Solaris 10/x86 instance on VMWare lately and
> have less heat and noise in the office.

For playing, I don't mind emulation.
 
> At home, I'm down to three computers on 24/7 (the iMac desktop, my wife's
> Windows PC,  and the Dell SC420 running Solaris x86 that does my backups).
> My Windows gaming machine hasn't been turned on in over a month, and the
> Alpha 164LX system won't be fired up for a few months (no time to play with
> it).    

I have three machines now that run 24/7:

	- Sun Ultra 1, doing DNS, mail, news, and gateway duty
	- Sun Ultra 2, doing WWW development, local apps, and some other
          processing duties
	- dual core Opteron desktop doing a little bit of everything, games
          included

I need a file server, and would like to use a Sun, but the drive cost is the
kicker.  Of course right now, money is tight so I'm making do with an external
drive and routing all backups to my desktop.  It sucks, but it works. 

I want another desktop for programming work so I can avoid the dual-boot
issue, but that's another unfunded project.

The other thing I'd like to add is an embedded system to train/re-train
myself.

I've sold off most of my other machines, including a couple of Alphas, a few
PC machines, and three Suns.  Too much heat and space for the power they gave.

I've still got to make run to the dump to throw away a 100baseT managed
switch, old printers, PC cases, etc.  They are hidden right now in closets so
I can't see them, and that made me lazy enough to just leave them there.

I am also probably going to dump my vintage Apple stuff, like the pair of
IIci machines I have.  Just can't find time to work play with them any more,
and so out they go.

I've even thought of replacing both of my Sun's with a single machine and let
it do everything.  I kind of hate to have a gateway machine running normal
apps, but it would be nice to reduce machine count to one that does it all.

I could use jails to put each function on a separate IP and virtual machine.



-- 
shannon           | There is no such thing as security.  Life is either
                  | bold adventure, or it is nothing.
                  |         -- Helen Keller