Strog's Journal: My Current Systems and OSes

I decided to write this to document my hardware so I can go back and compare later. You can comment if you like but it's here mainly for my own record and to play with the journal.

My main system:
Asus A7A266, 1.2Ghz Thunderbird Athlon, 256Mb PC2100 DDR, 41Gb IBM HD, Pioneer 114 DVD, Samsung 8x/8x/32x CDRW, Nvidia Geforce2 MX 400 dual head, Sound Blaster Live! Value, 3Com 905C WOL and put the whole thing in an older Micron full tower case with a few fans.

I'm going to build a quieter system next time. It's not terrible but it could be better than this. Guess I got spoiled when I had a Quicksilver G4 from work for 4 or 5 months. I had an 80Gb Maxtor but it started knocking a week after I got it. I did have Win98/2k/XP/Mandrake8.2/FreeBSD4.5 all up and playing nice. I'm running Win98/2k/Mandrke8.2 right now. The Windows setups also use Cygwin to keep all my tools close by. Cygwin has made a real good X server for some XDMCP work. I started to wonder about it when I started but they have made huge leaps in stability and performance.

I used to run a higher version of Xfree86 on my windows box than my Linux setup. I still had a Voodoo3 card and had to run 3.3.6 to play Unreal Tournament in hardware on the Voodoo card. The windows setup was running the latest 4.x series.

Wife's Computer:
Tyan 1598 MB, 128Mb RAM, Voodoo3, 52X CDROM, 4.3 WD HD, 3Com 905B, Diamond MX300 sound card, HP Deskjet printer, NEC Laser printer.

She runs Windows 98 2nd Ed and really only needs it for Quicken. Basically she uses it for her web discussion boards and chatting on MSN Messenger with her family and the occasional word processing.

I used to run an Unreal Tournament server in the background since she wasn't using very often. I hosted a few thousand games and had pretty good stats on the server before my ISP started filtering ports. I primarily ran small/medium maps on a rotation with LMS, low grav, instagib and mapvote.

Firewall:
Unisys CWD5001, Intel 133Mhz, 32Mb RAM, built-in NE2k, Linksys 10/100 NIC.

This model is small (like a small box of Grapenuts) with a floppy and one slot (shared PCI/ISA). I'm running Coyote Linux on it and don't have a hd in it. I'd like to get an ide flash drive and put one of the BSDs on it.

The bank I used to be the network administrator for used a bunch of these at the teller windows. They got tired of them and just started throwing them out if the hard drive or windows gave them any problems. I have several of these and have made basic firewalls for several friends and family.

File/Web server:
Tekram BX mb, P3 450Mhz, 352Mb RAM, Trident AGP video, 6.4Gb Seagate, 40Gb Maxtor, Plextor 20x SCSI CDROM, Panasonic 2x/4x SCSI burner, Linksys 10/100 NIC, Sound Blaster AWE64.

The sound card is for playing with some alerting software. The server sits under my wife's desk so the sound is for messing with her from time to time. It is running Mandrake 8.2 and serving up a low volume webserver that mostly hosts pictures of my son (currently 6 months old). It also houses my 15Gb mp3 collection. It runs NFS, SMB, Atalk, DHCP, TFTP. I also use for a little bit of Linux Terminal Server too. I made a boot disk for my wife's computer so she could pop it in and try linux. I almost had her convinced but the deal-breaker was she didn't have the icons for her MSN Messenger. I have been working with Trillian running under WINE so we will see if this is what she likes.

I haven't been able to make this old burner work at all under Linux. I'm going to pull it and replace it with a 4mm DAT SCSI drive. It is only 1.6Gb uncompressed but it beats not having a backup.

Mac PowerMac 8600/300:
300Mhz 604e, 96Mb, 4Gb SCSI HD, Zip drive.

Actually I have 3 of these with 32mb so I pulled the RAM and put it all in one. I saved them from the dumpster at school. I have OS 9.1, OS X 10.1.5, Linux on this system. I just put OS X on it to see if I could do it on an unsupported system and was surprised when it works decently. It's not a speed demon but does pretty good so it is usually up in OSX. I have a couple Promise ATA33 controllers so I threw one in to see if I could make it work. MacOS doesn't see it but when you load BootX and load Linux it can see it and run just fine off this card. I threw a 4.3Gb IDE hard drive on here and played with Yellow Dog 2.1/2.2 and Mandrake 8.0/8.2.

I would accept reasonable offers on the other 2 Macs if anyone is interested. Otherwise I will get some RAM for them and make nice file servers out of them.

R&D Box #1:
Tekram BX MB, Celeron 333Mhz, 128mb RAM, ATI Rage128 AGP, 8.4Gb WD HD, 52x CDROM, SMC 10/100 NIC, ES1370 sound card.

This is my FreeBSD box and I love FreeBSD more all the time. It seems to run better than the 450Mhz Linux box with nearly 3x the ram. I can hammer it and my Linux box and it just keeps going while the Linux box becomes unresponsive.

R&D Box #2:
HP Netserver E40, PPRo 200Mhz 512k cache, 64MB RAM, 3 or 4 2.1Gb Seagate UW SCSI HD, Intel 10/100 NIC.

This is my OpenBSD box. I haven't done too much with it yet. It used to be my file server and it even ran NT for a while with Apache on it. It's mainly a playing around box. Messed around with QNX, Solaris 7, Darwin, etc. on it.

SGI O2:
SGI O2, R10k ??Mhz CPU, 64Mb RAM, 4Gb HD, Audio module (No video), All Irix 6.3 media.

I don't actually have this in my possesion yet. My brother-in-law's work used to run all SGI and switched over to NT workstations. They used it until they needed the space for an NT box and it sat on a shelf until recently. They found out I was interested in SGI boxes and gave it to my brother-in-law to give to me. It is sitting out in Califonia right now and I live in Nebraska. Money was a little tight for them so he hadn't sent it so I'm sending him an identical spec machine as R&D box #1 with a return label to me. He wanted a Linux box to play with and learn on and I could use some closet space so it is a win-win. Uname tells us that it has Irix 6.3 on it. I can't wait to start playing with it.

And the Rest:
I have another 8 or 10 machines and parts in the closet ranging from 486 100Mhz to 233MMX. I have given away several 200Mhz Win95 to friends over the last 3 years. I couldn't seem to get rid of them for a while. I still have a few Pentium system around and they are good for testing and as X clients. My son is begining to take over my spaces and I need to find some more homes for the surplus machines. I'd love to move into a larger place but don't really need to spend more money so I'll keep looking for those good deals in housing.