Bits and pieces about my present and past computers. As most anything here, this is archived content. Mostly kept for the (mild) fun factor. Also a personal chronicle of sorts.

Note that practically all of this is ancient. My current setup involves a fileserver (in a nromal case), my Macbook Pro and little else except for the usual ungainly tangle of crap.

This was my "server cabinet" in former times. It held to of my servers, cardboard and sellars. The third (at that time), leela, was sitting under my desk. The cabinet also contained most of my network and phone cabling.

<kitten> You see Lasar's machines?
<bda> The one he set on fire?
<bda> Or the cardboard ones?
<kitten> Half of them are cardboard boxes wrapped in duct tape.
<kitten> YEah.
<bda> Yeah.
<bda> Lasar's a burn victim waiting to happen.

The router machine. A pentium 133MHz based system. The first of my cardboard box machines. Has been running fine for.. a long time now. The small processor fan died once, but other than that this old piece of legacy hardware runs very well indeed.

cardboard has recently been switched to running on Debian on a 450 MB hard drive. Previously it had been running for something like at least 2 years on Coyote Linux off of a floppy, with no hard drive installed.

There are two NICs in the machine. One is connected to the ADSL hardware, bringing the internet into my home. The other connects to my 8 port switch which in turn is connected to other machines and the second 8-port switch.

The second cardboard computer. I do not remember the source of the hardware, I think it was the guts of an older computer I got from a friend. Or somewhere else.

sellars is powered by a 300MHz Pentium processor running Debian unstable from a 2GB hard drive and saving temporary data in 256MB of RAM.

sellars, together with cardboard and leela forms my local server trinity. While cardboard maintains my external net connection and leela keeps and serves my files, sellars provides needed (and not so needed) services. It runs a DNS cache with added info to point internal domain names to my local machines. It runs Apache to serve a few things to me and even to the great wide internet. It did email for a while. It is the machine that I reach when I ssh into my home network from the outside. It runs the small software I built to monitor the availability of local and remote machines that interest me or are under my control. It also keeps up my 24 hour IRC connection. And it processes cam images made on indy. There's more, but I forget.

Here you can see sellars inside the server cabinet. The box I carved sellars' case out of was the original box in which my iBook was enclosed.

I was never really sure I'd finish this one.

The story goes like this. I was planning on setting up my own fileserver, something I hadn't previously used. So I went out and purchased a 120GB hard drive. The processor and board (A 400MHz Pentium on a MiniATX board) I got from a friend for little money. The rest of the machine was clobbered together from random parts I had left over. I also threw in the CD burner from the broken Firewire case, previously attached to io.

Next I went into a hardware store and got a nice cheap black plastic/wood tool suitcase. That and some miscellaneous items.

The assembly took some time. I don't really remember, but it should be somewhere close to about two months from the first idea to the finishing touches. Not that it will ever be ready, but it's basically complete and does work. Or not. A lot of this time was of course spent furiously gathering dust.

The first problem was getting all the parts to fit in the box. After a lot of moving parts around and eventually taking apart the power supply (it was too big), I had the layout down. Then I started drilling holes for the connectors and for screws to hold the hardware in place. This went quite nicely, even though I am not that good at doing straight lines (read: I suck).

After a lot of drilling and filing and sawing I had holes for the keyboard connector (no mouse), power, monitor, NIC and headphone port done, also a couple of holes for blue status LEDs and a big ungainly opening for the CD burner.

The hardware was assembled and disassembled quite a few times. Problems appeared and were solved or just disappeared.

What was left was the big holes for the two fans I intended to put into the box. At this point the process pretty much stalled. I began setting up things and installing the system, but all the while the case had to remain open to ensure sufficient air flow.

Then I had a carpenter drill pretty round holes in the correct size into the side. This was a blessing, as holes drilled by me would have been extremely uneven and ugly and generally not an improvement.

Of course a portable machine like this can't be used as a file server. So I moved the 120GB hard drive to leela. leela was my mother's Windows machine at that point, but got replaced my the (faster) durandal.

tma1 is currently sitting around without a hard drive. The CD burner was taken apart a few times when I tried to add an external open/close button. For that I had to attach cables to the little switch inside the drive. Now it's very very noisy and closes itself after two seconds when I open it, but it still works.

Something is wrong with the hardware, at least any system running on the box seems to be a little unstable. I'm not sure whether it is the cabling or maybe something I (slightly) broke on the motherboard.

Anyway this thing turned out to be a success in my eyes. It was fun to do, it works and it did not end as a pile of crap in the corner.

So, onwards to the pictures taken with my superior webcam!

Something not everyone has. This is my SGI Indy, running on a 150MHz R4400(IP22) processor. behold the power! It has a blasting 64 MB of RAM and a nice 8 Gig (SCSI) hard drive. It also came with an IndyCam, which is pretty much a webcam with shitty quality. But hey, better than no cam at all.

The monitor is a very nice 20" also by SGI. For some reason the controls for adjusting the screen are on a little remote control that is hidden in the front of the monitor. Cool but largely pointless.

The Indy runs IRIX 6.2, which was purchased on eBay. Currently it is sporadically used as the cam machine. And very rarely as a surfing machine with Netscape 4.7. It helped me a lot in the month after I broke io.

Sadly no photos exist of this machine. Google finds quite a few though.

It was my third foray into the cardboard box computer sector, and the reddest. Having a big roll of red tape on hand did motivate Borgi and me to cover this machine in red all over. Thus the name was born and added to the top with red, green and white tape.

The hardware inside was a Pentium 75MHz on an unspecified board, running Debian from a ~400MB hard drive (I think the hard drive is the one powering leela now. But I'm not sure, I don't keep track of hardware so well.

Well, the red baron does not exist anymore. After having run for some time as a small (and slow) testing platform for sites and things we did for liepins.net, it was shut down. Testing was moved to sellars or the external web server. In consequence parts were removed one after the other. The first thing to go was the power supply, the graphics card and the NIC followed. Then I took it apart completely and stashed away the parts, to be used again.

The motherboard will be the base of loewe when I get that project rolling. I think. Now that I mention it, I don't remember where the board is.

And this is the first computer I have used. My father bought it back in 1988 (or at least that's the year to be found on the back of the machine), and it continues to run to this day. The 40MB (yes, Megabytes) hard drive died a few years ago, but I replaced with another (used) one of the same size. It's more than enough to hold a normal install of Mac System 7 plus some apps. If I need more space, there's always floppy disks. Wait, no. I hate floppy disks.

I have even installed an Ethernet card in the machine, but have not yet gotten it to run. Using the drivers crashes the machine. Which is too bad, it would make a fun little ssh terminal to the world.

Well, not exactly a computer on my network. I don't remember where the box came from, but it is was some kind of 486 PC that wasn't working anymore. Well, Adrian and me are hobby pyromaniacs, and there was Zippo lighter fluid at hand. So.. stuff happened. We even reassembled the CPU after we burned and broke it. Duct tape helped a lot. No testing was done though. I expect the performance to have taken a hit.

To ze pictures

• neotek
• wall
• mono
• 3400
• halo
• io
• continuity
• leela
• uplink
• pinball
• durandal