Gordon Grieder wrote: > On Thu, Oct 12, 2006 at 09:22:43PM -0400, Steve Shockley wrote: >> Bryan Irvine wrote: >> > You win. >> >> I'm waiting for Nick Holland to chime in... he's probably got an SE/30 >> in production, or maybe a VAXstation 2000. > > Nick replied ages ago but his machine is still processing the outgoing > mail. ;)
smart a**. :) I can't believe people with PIIs and PIIIs even responded to this thread, however. You GOT to be kidding me...That ain't old. That's almost as new as I get! I've actually been on something of a hardware upgrade binge lately. Noticed the piles of Celeron 400 machines was just getting too big to ignore...and ssh connection times on older machines are starting to get on my nerves. It can be difficult to avoid temptation. HOWEVER: my mail and web server: P233MMX (probably a 200MHz overclocked). A friend of mine whom I host on it (over a 256k DSL line) had his site listed on theregister.co.uk, the machine handled it much better than the DSL line did. My internal DNS/DHCP server: P90 (overclocked to 100MHz, I think I turned off the processor fan) non-UDMA chipset. i.e., slow. BUT built like a tank. I just replaced it with a Cel333 last week. It may return, however...I've got this urge to CARP my DNS process with a pair of 100MHz machines, one of them a sparc. :) I just decommissioned an old machine at a client, P75. Installed back in the 2.7 days, located in an automotive service station, and I'm scared to open it up to see what it looks like inside. I am sure no CoreDuo or AMD64 will ever survive that depth of dirt (break dust, oil, tobacco smoke...and dust, dating back to 1919 when this place was opened). It hasn't been opened or cleaned since it was installed. I'm planning on replacing my mail/web server, but it is sitting next to the above mentioned system...I'm not sure how long a PII-450 is going to last in that kind of dust... I've got an Interjet which I use on and off as a MAC-address buffer, Bi-NATing to another machine, which I can change as I wish without altering the MAC address I show my cable provider. 75MHz 486-class system, probably (I stuffed a DX4 chip in it, not sure what it started out with, it isn't very clear what clock speed it is running). I've got a 80386/40MHz I power up from time to time when there is something to test. I did put OpenBSD on a 80386DX/25 with a 300M ESDI hard disk, but ESDI disks have bad sectors that aren't locked out before the OS sees them, and dealing with that during install was just a pain...so it never got 100% functional with the ESDI disk. That was painful, btw. It is hard to remember just how much faster a cheap IDE disk is now than those (once) wickedly fast ESDI drives... I've got an IBM 80386sx/16MHz machine that I can put 12M RAM in, if I can find an 80387sx, I'm going to try to get the slowest build times available, but I doubt it will ever be used as a production machine. I've got a 386sx that I can get up to 15M or 16M in, but it's 25MHz, that's not as exiting (and still needs the 387sx). I have an mvme88k, 25MHz, 128M RAM (think about that. That was a snootload of RAM in its day...) Not really in service for any purpose. Got a P166 which has been serving as a PF/authpf filtered IRC server since at least the 3.1 days... Once I get off my butt and get a few quad SBus NICs, I'm hoping to put some sparcs or sparc64 into real production. Seems most of the need I have for 'em require more than the on-board NIC. Firewall: 300MHz Cel. Machine I do most of my OpenBSD writing work on: dual PIII-866. That's excessive. A couple months ago, it was a dual PII-300, but it used weird RAM, and I was stuck at 192M...and I wanted more for some other things I wanted to do with the machine. Main file/utility server: dual PII-400 (due to be replaced for the same reason: weird RAM, and stuck at 256M). mac68k testing: Quadra650 (not sure that qualifies as production, even though it runs at 100% CPU for days at a time when doing a build). Also hard to brag for slowness rights when it is almost as fast as the Quadras got. No, I don't have an SE/30... :) Fluffy, the three-headed monster machine: AMD XP2700+. yeah, it's a bit out of place around here. I must say, it does run Mozilla and Thunderbird..er..acceptably. 8-/ When trying to recommission an old machine, you run into a few odd problems. Often, they don't have enough disk, you will need more, but that's not too difficult. You may be tempted to replace that old 2G disk with something bigger, but I'm not sure which is more reliable: a ten year old 2G disk that is still running or a new 160G disk. The killer is usually RAM. I've replaced a few machines lately only because they used weird RAM, and it was cheaper to put in a new machine with many times the performance and semi-standard RAM (or in the case of my RAMBUS dual PIII-866, enough RAM to start with) than to track down Dell EDO DIMMs that actually work in that dual PII-300. Even the machines that used "standard" RAM are hard to fill as needed. OpenBSD can be run on 16M, but usually you want more...and 30pin and 72pin SIMMs large enough to get you to 32M and up are getting hard to come by. They are all over the place, but deeper in most people's scrap piles than they care to dig. :) New computers run so hot that failure of any of the fans can be fatal rapidly. My (overclocked) 100MHz DNS server's processor ran so cool, I just unplugged the processor fan. It was completely pointless while running OpenBSD, and it booted fast enough that the heatsink worked fine passively. I do plan on upgrading my mail and webserver soon, but I suspect the newer machine won't last anywhere near as long as the old machines did. Nick.
