Finegan's assorted managerie of beeping junk.
I've been called out on LinuxQuestions a lot for having under my profile,
under distribution, a huge list of basically the past 3 or so releases of
the big 6 distributions. The principle doubt being raised could be
paraphrased with: "I simply don't believe you have that many machines."
I'll try to keep the following list up to date as much as I can be
bothered, possibly so as to maintain my own sanity. What follows
is a list of basically any machine I have root access to, which is
more or less the measure of ownership that makes sense to go by.
[Update 2-15-03] Its been about a year since I first put together this
little file, and it just keeps getting bigger as more wandering detritus
makes it into and out of my closet of parts. Somehow the "farm" as its
called on LQ, has become somewhat of running joke outside of my telling
it. I gotta like that, even if I gotta hate the power bills.
Pictures!
New! 10-26-02 Newer! 2-15-03
Most of the Rack of Doom.
Wurli gone, Ruprecht on the job, and
the room is clean!
To the right of the rack, one of the world's most abused wireless routers. Now, sadly off the job.
The house's last manifestation of Gates influence.
The machines I have in my room
that are turned on. The monitors match
now, and I finally chisled out the plate block infront of my USB
ports!
The machines I have in my room
that are well... waiting for work. There are still a few left...
plus Wurlitzer and the re-assembled Horatio downstairs.
New Category:
Machines that work, we don't know who really ownes, that live at my
house:
Orwell Athlon 800Mhz
384Mb 640Mb RAM: Slackware 8.1 Slackware
9.0 Joshy's RAM, Sexy Nick's Dan's motherboard, Sexy
Nick's vidcard, my hard drives, PSU, and old case, Saneesh's NIC,
and Dan's chip. That's gear from 4 guys... Nick wants to take it
and stick Plan 9 on it. I dunno, we'll
figure it out. We figured it out, and now it runs The Clock and served this
page. (Odd Note: 10-16-02 the / drive started giving us the "click of death", so
Saneesh and I stayed up far too late and backed up just about everything, ever...
and then got paranoid the fan was too small so we replaced it with an extra socket
A that my closet burped up.[SIGHUP-date, 6-01-03: Yesterday
starting at around about 4pm, Saneesh and I set to installing the big horking disk array, and
after a few false starts and stumbles got the Clock updated to
Slackware 9.0. Orwell now lives in a brand new case, and is no
longer bound to 14.8Gb of disk, but instead, 155!]
Machines that work, I own, and live at my house:
[update 2.15.03: Jack is back in effect!] Jack, Tyler,
Marla, Spacemonkey,
Bob Athlon 1.2Ghz 512Mb 768Mb 512Mb RAM:
penta dual Uni
dual Back to Uni-boot Dual boot
again...; Win98(Fuck a bunch of Windows.
Gone, gone forever! I'll just have to hook digicam up to my roommate's
machine.[can't, fucking Vivitar never made win2k drivers, gphoto doesn't cover
it, and after a week of fighting with Mercury running Win95 I just ordered a USB
SmartMedia card reader.], Slackware 8.1
,FreeBSD
4.5,
Mandrake 8.2 ,LFS 3.1 Mandrake 9.0 Beta
(in that order) Solaris 9 x86, AND NOW... Slackware 9.0 a really
big Toy and testing ground for the
Distro of the Week/month/eon,
and now dominated by Slackware 8.1, damnit! I had a meltdown so now even Mandrake is gone.
I've got to come up with a different Distro to put on it soon... maybe Debian
again... Nah... ended up being Mandy 9.0 Beta. Back to solely
Slack 8.1 as I yanked the little 2.8Gb drive for duty in Orwell. I also threw together
xinerama with an extra 3dfx Voodoo3 PCI card, check out the screenshot. I yanked the ATI and the Voodoo and threw in
a Matrox G550 I pickup up off of git.ads. Its sick, really sick. I'm thinking of just
throwing the Voodoo back in and having 3 monitors.[Nov 20-ish] I got a
pair of gigantic matching 19-inch Samsungs from Rob due to some viet.com
firesale. Oh its sick! [update: 2.15.03: Now running the wonder that is
Solaris 9, patched to get a generic Tulip card to work, and again to get
XFree wrappers to notice the G550, and finally again to get Gnome 2.0 as
an option...] [Will the Updates ever stop??? 3-19-03: Slackware 9.0
came out yesterday, it was pretty pimp, but I had to get creative with the
install as the modules for the xfs kernel were in /extra, and hence... not
on the install CD. Also, where the fuck did Eterm go? KDE was almost
pretty enough to make me run it... for more than the half hour it took to
sort out XFree and the G550 again.] Oh my! [Ceaseless updates:
6-01-03, Added a Nvidia TNT Riva thanks to the graciousness of Grant, so now I have one
of the few machines sporting 48Mb of video RAM over 2 cards and...
this is just sick: three monitors!
Tenacious
Pentium 200Mhz 64Mb RAM: Slackware 8.0, Slackware
8.1 Slackware 9.0, runs a domain. My first experiment with
Qmail, which is now gone, and now its serving for my mucking about with
iptables. (Yeah, uhm, Nov. 2002) T is now hard at work as the house's
wireless router, again I think, its been a while. Now on Apache 2.0.45
with PHP and mod_jk, an odd annoyance combo to get compiled.
Blue Sparc Station 10 2x50Mhz 32Mb RAM: RedHat 6.2, I'm
gonna try a Sparc LFS soon, er, maybe. Installed Debian
3.0r0, don't know what to say yet, haven't really had the
oportunity to fiddle with it. With all of the other machines on
the rack being tty only server crates I guess I'm going to slap
fluxbox on it and let it be the house term. Oh, FYI, SILO still
has issues with the 1024 limit.
Wolfwood Ultra Sparc 5
270Mhz 256Mb RAM: SuSe 7.3 OpenBSD 3.2, Unfortunately the
only monitor I could get to work
with this incredible PGX graphics card was a 15-inch. It only has a 4.3Gb drive,
so I'm just using it as the Gimp station for now. Well, that and hosting
The Clock's dot-org.
(Sped Note: 10am on a Saturday morning with a cold I put NetBSD on
it, found there were no pre-compiled packages, and then found a
goofy way to install OpenBSD by dd'ing a bootable image to swap
partition!?!?) Anyway, not only does wolfwood appear under the
NetCraft survey, its now listed as an unknown.
Nifty!
Nimble Pentium III 500Mhz 128Mb RAM: RedHat
7.2 Slackware 8.1 OpenBSD 3.3,
i1400 IBM Thinkpad. This was a fun toy until the power charge pin bent out of
shape and now it won't charge. Saneesh and I are going to take it
apart this weekend and fix it. Then I'm going to try a couple weird distros on it.
Nimble LIVES!!! 2 weeks of pulling it apart, borrowing tools, fiddling with IBM
docs, and finally handing a 2 inch by 1 inch little board over to Saneesh to solder back
together. Four and a half hours of re-assembly later and everything works. Okay,
well I accidently chopped the volume wheel's cable so its a little loud at kde
start-up I fixed the sound issue with the switch to Slack 8.1, a much happier
laptop now. (Odd note: 10-17-02, a few weeks ago the power adapter cracked and
once again Joel proved he is the solder ninja.) [Ed. Note: 5-06-03
I switched up to OpenBSD 3.3 and finally took a good hard look at
the ports collection, and damn do I like it! It took some hacking
to get Opera to work right, and the ports tree takes some of the
fun out of things... but hey, it does rock the shizbit, one day
later and I have a new Eterm, fluxbox, gaim, opera, bitchx, and
its much less piggy on disk... and all the wifi works!]
Machines that don't work right now, I own, and live at my
house:
Printerstand, sometimes Shithead 386DX 16Mhz 4MB RAM:
Nothing, as it has no hard drive. It can take up to a 500Mb, so I yanked
the drive out of Gomer once and booted that... it took a while. Maybe I'll
swap Gomer's drive in and use this as a print server for the Okidata
later.
Horatio Pentium Pro 200Mhz 128Mb RAM: Slackware
8.0 Slackware 8.1, Came to live with Iron
Mike and Saneesh as I stupidly moved out of
DSL range. [8-5-02] Horatio is back at the ghetto-colo! Jeremy, my great
old pal from Procyon switched the DNS
while I was taking a diner break at Waffle House on the way to set it up.
This machine served this page. I took Horatio off of the
job. This is a great little machine, served us well for nearly a year,
and I hate to not do anything with it... I guess I should finally get
around to getting SMP to work, then come up with something for him to do
after that. Alas Horatio, we've gutted him, put all his
RAM in Wurlitzer for greater house file servage. His last drive went to
Orwell for The Clock. We snagged its next to last ethernet card for Wurli
also. One day I'll get around to tracking down a VRM for this machine and
get it running SMP. (Jan, 23 2003) I might just "borrow"
Wurlitzer's VRM shortly. Horatio is back on the job in Tyler's old monster
full-tower case with a PSU Grant claimed was DOA, and 4, count'em, 4
drives, 3 of which make up the world's crappiest RAID-5 array. I put it
together one night just to see if I could do it, took nearly an hour to
parallelize 3 4Gigs.
Ferris Celeron 300Mhz 16Mb RAM 148Mb RAM:
Mandrake 7.2 Slackware 8.1, A few months ago Wilson threatened to
bring by a spare machine that his wife didn't need any longer. He didn't know the
specs on it, or whether it ran or not. Imagine my surprise after I had tracked down
one of those old-school pre-PS2 keyboards to plug into it that it wasn't a 486, but a
Cely! And it came preloaded running Mandy! I think it may have been a printserver in
a previous life. I'm currently at a loss as to what to do with it, more OpenBSD,
maybe just some manic Overclocking experiments.[Nov 24th] I lent this crate off to
Ben who's D-Link router is on RMA. I was kind of surprised to find that when I was
rebuilding the little machine that I had put the two best network cards in the house
in it. [update: 3-08-03] I yanked a card because the SMC I got from Matt went bazoo in
old Ruprecht.
Machines that don't work right now, I don't own, and live at my
house:
Wurlitzer Pentium Pro 2x180Mhz 64Mb 196Mb RAM:
Slackware 8.1 , FreeBSD 5.0-RCish
House MP3 server Off the job. when my pal Grant
gets off his duff and buys the 40Gig. Actually, we went ahead and got a 60
Gig. The project is on, 5 Gigs filled already. [Update 1-6-03: The HPT343
in Wurli had a transfer rate of about 1.4 Mb/sec, which wasn't cutting it, so I
swapped the 60 into Ruprecht as well as the new 80. Then I dropped the 12GB from
Ruprecht into Wurli so I could play with FreeBSD's SMP code... sometime here in the
next few weeks at least.] (followup: 1-23-03, I never got FreeBSD SMP to
run, it kept complaining about not finding the local APIC, maybe something
odd about its micronics motherboard? When I take down the worthless RAID-5
in Horatio, I'll probably swap in the spare PPro 200 I have sitting around
and see if I can get it going on Horatio's uber-common PR440FX Intel
board.
Gomer Pentium 100Mhz 24Mb RAM: Slackware 7.1, SETI@home, because if
Christopher
Walken isn't proof of Aliens, then Gomer is going to have to fine
'em. Gomer is another shelf monster, couldn't really afford to
power him against the AC, the aliens can remain hidden.
Machines that work, I don't own, and live at my house.
Che Pentium 166Mhz40Mb RAM:
Slackware 8.0, house NAT crate, and for the time being hosts The Clock's dot-com variation. Che hit
the shelf with Horatio back to do the Nat'ing.
Muffin AMD Athlon 800Mhz 512Mb
RAM: RedHat 7.3, my friend Joshy's server,
colocated in my living room.
Ruprecht AMD K6-2 450Mhz 256Mb 128MB RAM: Windoze
98 Slackware 8.1 OpenBSD 3.1
FreeBSD 5.0-rc1 Slack 8.1 again!, This is my
roommate's Compaq. I list it for completeness sake and the fact that I put
half the hardware it runs on in it. I rebuilt this thing from spare
parts after my roommate gutted it to put everything in his new crate. This
might take over as the house MP3 server as Wurli's HPT PCI adapter isn't
giving a whole lot of throughput. Until then, beats
me. Okay, Venus wasn't cutting it with OpenBSD, I was
having too much juggling with pcmcia NICs to learn anything, so I
swapped up for a desktop. Thanks to Joshy for lending me yet
another pci NIC. Ruprecht hit the shelf as well, a
sacrifice to the xinerama gods and the balooning power
bills. [12-22ish] Ruprecht became the grand FreeBSD
experiment, back in effect... too bad I've gotten sidetracked on
fiddling with xfs over the past week or so. [update 1-6-03: I made Ruprecht the
house file server after I got sick of Wurli's pokiness. 140 GB of XFS recovered from a lockup
in 5 seconds... oh I love this filesystem.]
Logic, Chaos Athlon XP 1900 (1.67Ghz?) 512Mb RAM: Windows 2000,
Mandrake 8.2 My roommate's new machine and his first foray into Linux use.
Of course he decided on Enlightment as a wm, so I'm a bit lost as to how
to help him with every fifth thing. Right now the big issue is how to get
mp3s to play under xmms from a read-only NTFS partition.
Earth Pentium 133Mhz 24Mb RAM: Debian Potato (2.2r3), Laptop, the other half of
the above. Somehow these two made it back to my house after Saneesh's brother field
stripped them trying to get a working CDROM from Mercury into Venus, who's CDROM was dead.
He made a big nasty mess so I offered to throw them back together and now with a working
CDROM I can install stuff on them! They have quick swappable hardrives and are identical
machines so this'll be fun, except that in-kernel pcmcia never works for them due to their
pre-cambrian bridge, so I'm going to have to get funky with the cheese whiz if I want to
re-start the "grand wireless experiment". The wireless LAN is back in
effect. Maybe I'll bother to war chalk my
curb. (Nov 2002-ish) I never bothered to war chalk the curb, and Earth is now off the
job. This little guy must have been the most reliable always on machine in my house for
the past year, and is easily the one that saw the biggest uptimes; one got to 120-ish
days.
Pain, Mercury Pentium 133Mhz 24Mb RAM: Win95 Slackware 8.0, I
revived this machine, finding a 3Gb Laptop HD in the process (!!!), in
order to offload the pictures from digicam. After fighting with win95 and
pcmcia for a day I gave up and put Slack on the spare partition.
Machines that work, I do own, that don't live at my house.
Diane Athlon 1.4Ghz (underclocked to 1050Mhz), 256Mb RAM,
Slackware 8.1 , I picked up an ECS motherboard off of
Ebay for about $40,
slapped the "supposedly" burnt 1.4Ghz 266 FSB T-Bird that Saneesh had dropped off a month or two ago into it, stole some RAM from Tyler, dropped in
the 2 4.0Gb drives Wilson dropped off, and hoisted a 17-inch monitor onto my shoulder and headed this kid off to work. I promised Cometa that the next machine would have a girl's name, so this serves as sort of an homage to Twin
Peaks. It also rocks to have a dual-head machine to hack on at work... oh
my, it rocks. [update: 5-2-03] I traded in a SCSI 50-pin 9.1 for a 68-pin
UW, but couldn't get lilo happy, so I dropped in an 8Gb Seagate IDE drive
and for good measure threw in my old 4x4x6 burner.
Machines that work, I don't own, that don't live at my house.
(I include this because among the Clockwatchers, especially those at the
House of Chaos, there are quite a few machines that just don't have a
purpose right now, or if we just ask the owner, they get lent out. The
large reson they're not doing anything right now is that a pile of them
just got back from running my Wireless LAN.)
Cartman Pentium 2 233Mhz 196Mb RAM: Slackware 8.1, This is Wayne's monster that
I helped him set up one night to be his house Samba file server, domain server for Lorigami, and a PostgreSQL machine for a class project
of his. I got Postgre compiled and installed and then I stepped slowly back from the
databasing.
Morphy AMD K6-3 500Mhz 128Mb RAM: RedHat 7.2 Slackware 8.1 (Dec 02: Slackware released some patch
.tgz's with XFree86 4.2.1 which finally supports this thing's crap video card, hence the upgrade to Slack), Compaq Presario
1200 notebook. A pseudo-perma loaner from my friend Rob who took pity on me when Nimble went kazoo. I dragged this thing just
about everywhere and used the hell out of it, before I fixed Nimble, so now Rob said it was cool to continue the loan onto Nick. Thanks Rob :)
Jupiter Pentium 75Mhz 16Mb RAM: Mandrake 8.1, Laptop, wouldn't
boot a 2.2 kernel, no CDROM, so I did an NFS install of Mandy via Nimble.
I could never get X to work, but it was fun fighting with it. It also has
a twin, Saturn, but I never bothered trying to get anything on
that.
Apology/Entropy Powerbook G3 400Mhz 256MB RAM: Mac OS9, LinuxPPC 2000, Bob's old laptop, the Toned Mac. The
power adapter on it broke, as is typical with laptops, heck it happened to me too, look at
Nimble from above. So after a week or so of fiddling with it, two solder jobs (thanks
Joel), and a bunch of googling, I was finally able to root Chris's old Linux partition. I
didn't find anything, well aside from the source trees to 4 kernels.
Venus Pentium 133Mhz 24Mb RAM: Slackware 8.0
OpenBSD 3.1, Laptop, part of the great neurotic wireless
experiment, and now my first OpenBSD experiment. What in the hell
is a ports tree anyway? (er... Nov 2002) This got loaned out to Grant, not the Clockwatcher
Grant, the other one. I still have the OpenBSD hard drive. I think the one it has now is
Win95+Slackware 8.0
Of the above there is a few I didn't
mention as they don't live at my house, are really not functional, parts, etc. For instance the 3 laptops
listed last are named after planets as there used to be 9 of them! There
is a Pentium something, ready to go in Saneesh's machine room, but we just
haven't bothered with it yet. Basically, if you're reading this you
probably have a parts closet from hell too, and like me could throw
together a working machine given a mobo and a chip. Most of these
that don't have jobs are installation toys as I still haven't
found the distro I really like.
accurate as of June 1st,
2003
