[TriLUG] just retired my two 25 year old routers

[Joseph Mack NA3T via TriLUG]

Two Dell Optiplex XL 575, from 1995, 75MHz Pentium, with two extra ISA nics 
each, and loaded to the gills with 128M memory (they came with 32M).

I've had 1 fan failure, and a couple of disks die (but not too many). The 
problem keeping them going was finding small enough IDE disks forto boot off 
(the BIOS wouldn't recognise the 40GB disks, which was the smallest IDE I could 
get). So for the last 10 years I've been booting off floppies where the kernel 
will ignore the BIOS and recognise the hard disk. Last kernel upgrade was 10 
years ago. (Joe's helpful tip of the day: Never upgrade a working machine.)

They're plenty fast for DSL (which I'm using). However one day I'll probably go 
to something faster. As well looking for IDE disks is a pain, and they're not 
being made any more.

I bought 10 of the computers used, for $200 each and built a test beowulf with 
them. After I was done with that, I made two of them into routers. The rest are 
stacked neatly decorating my living room serving as a stand for my hole punch.

As you probably have figured, I upgraded big-time. I've got a pair of 2.xGHZ, 
dual core 32 bit small form factor ThinkCentres, with 2GB memory, running 
Slackware 14.2, with SATA drives and 3 PCI nics each. The new setup is open for 
viewing on Sunday afternoons where you can gaze in wonder.

Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant
map generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!