Strog's Journal: July update on Systems and OSes

Updates

My main system:
I upgraded the CPU to an Athlon XP 1800. I got the 80Gb back in it and am in the process of getting FreeBSD and WinXP back on it. I had to steal the DDR ram for another system but put 512mb of SDR ram in its place. I still see all this as an overall improvement. I think I'll worry about video next.

Wife's Computer:
Added 64mb to bring it up to 192mb. Changed out the 4.3Gb hd for a 20gb one. It's much faster and she is happy with it. I'm thinking about upgrading her to Win2k now.

Firewall:
Rebooted and found out another floppy died on me. I've had it so I put in my HP Netserver in there temporarily and threw OpenBSD 3.1 on it. A couple weeks later I grabbed a Pentium 166MMX and clocked it down to 100Mhz. It has 64mb of ram, 2.1 Gb hd and 3 SMC 10/100 NICs. PF is really great and gives a lot of flexiblity. I should have done this a long time ago. I just never got around to it.

I pulled the CDROM and recessed the floppy and covered all the bays with covers so nothing is showing. I also removed the reset switch and clipped the power button. My son is crawling now and I'm trying to baby-proof as much as possible if he gets around the baby gate(s). All the systems under my desk now have the cables out of sight and are close together. There is a horseshoe of systems under the center with all cables behind that.

R&D Box #1:
I'm sending this to my brother-in-law for his birthday. He wants a Unixish box to play with. He also wants to mess with Perl, C, etc. for his work. I'm going to put a return label in the box so he can send me the SGI O2.

R&D Box #2:
After the time as a firewall, it is now back to a play box. I got an old Matrox G200 Marvel I might throw in there. I've been wanting to mess with some tv in/out and tuner in *nix.

SGI O2
Still in CA. I'm hoping to get it here very soon.