[rescue] restorations and keyboards

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Tuesday 03 February 2004 23:19, Jeff Workman wrote:
> (Hello everybody, it's been a long, long time...)

Hi!

> I take a lot of pride myself in running all 3 of the public
> pimpworks.org machines on old alphas, two of which are old
> 3000/300LXs.  These machines are from what? 1989 or so?  I'm pretty

No!  In 1989, DEC was possibly selling MIPS machines (DECstations), the 
Alpha wasn't released until the mid-early 90s, and the 3000/300LX came 
out in 1994 from what Google tells me.  "A person I know" worked on the 
development/architecture verification of the Alpha.

> sure they predate the WWW, at the very least.

Possibly wide-spread WWW use, but not the development of HTML (1992?).

The only issue I have with using machines this old is it's painful to 
connect to them via SSH.  Those 3000/300LX's aren't too bad, but 
something like a 70MHz Sparcstation 5 just takes FOREVER to create a 
session key.  I don't even want to think what a MicroVAX 3400 would be 
like...  

And yes, I *have to* (save one exception) be able to use SSH.  There's 
no way in hell I'm going to have my password flying around in cleartext 
each time I want to ftp/telnet to a machine on campus from home.  I 
might be able to mostly-trust Purdue's data network to be 
fairly-secure, but the same doesn't apply on the route from my Cable 
ISP to campus.  The one exception I make is the machines I have running 
VMS, since I have yet to find a decent free SSH client/server (OpenSSH 
port) for VMS.  Of course, then I'm sshing to a machine on the same 
switch and then telnet/ftping over from a different machine on the same 
Ethernet switch, so it's basically still pretty secure.

Pat
-- 
Purdue University ITAP/RCS
Information Technology at Purdue
Research Computing and Storage
http://www.itap.purdue.edu/rcs/