[rescue] home "server rooms"

[Chris Hedemark]

On Thu, 2002-06-20 at 08:16, Kris Kirby wrote:

> Good god man! How does anyone one person accumulate *200* machines? That's
> not a hobby -- that's a full-fledged side venture. You'd need a big barn
> to hold all that stuff!

Usually dumb luck.  I just network myself with people who run into such
things and tell them I like to collect "weird" computers.  Now to you
and me a Sparc 10 is not weird but it is not a PeeCee either so they
don't know what to do with it half the time.

The bulk of my collection all came to me in one shot.  About $55 for a
tractor trailer load of stuff that schools were discarding.  Mosty macs
of various vintage.  Even I have my limits, so the Apple II's went to
the dump.  Everything from LC on up to PowerMac 5400 found a new home
with me.

There was a significant number of Pentium computers as well (P100 to
P133).  They are terribly useful for firewalling and other odd jobs. 
I've been selling most of those off though since I only need a small
handful of X86 boxen.

> Mike Dombroski(sp?) has a 108-port 10Mb hub. It uses RJ21 (Centronics 50)
> connectors.

Ouch.

Well I have enough ports now to run a few dozen machines at a time.  All
but 16 of them at 100Mbps.  At least the 10Mbps ports are switched (with
a 100Mbps uplink).  And I think those 68K macs only do 10Mbps anyway. 
Realistically it's going to take me a long time to get all those
machines up anyway so I might just be satisfied with "only" a few dozen
ports hot at a time.