[TriLUG] just retired my two 25 year old routers

[Greg Brown via TriLUG]

Oh wow, the old beige Dell OptiPlex.  I had them in use for years as well.
My last living original beige OptiPlex finally gave up the ghost about four
years ago.  I miss the old heater, I mean computer.  For my very few home
visitors the old beast was a source of curiosity.  For a time the case
became home to a Raspberry Pi cluster and after that it hit the
recycling ahead of my move to Texas I'm sorry to say.

On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 1:43 PM Joseph Mack NA3T via TriLUG <
trilug at trilug.org> wrote:

> 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!
> --
> This message was sent to: Greg Brown <gwbrown1 at gmail.com>
> To unsubscribe, send a blank message to trilug-leave at trilug.org from that
> address.
> TriLUG mailing list : https://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug
> Unsubscribe or edit options on the web  :
> https://www.trilug.org/mailman/options/trilug/gwbrown1%40gmail.com
> Welcome to TriLUG: https://trilug.org/welcome