Finegan's assorted managerie of beeping junk.
Ghetto-Colo Status: Machines On: 6 (Gaspode, Tyler, Wolfwood, Osiris, Tom, DrGonzo) Laptops Functional: 3 (Sidearm, Earth, Nimble)

Last Updated: 5-19-05 Well, Hunter S. may be gone, but Raoul Duke is alive in well in the ghetto-colo. Introducing DrGonzo, the new house fileserver. In other news the house is at the fewest number of running machines since we moved in, with Tenacious, Diane, and Orwell all retired for the time being. (5-21-05) and with the 2x250 SATA drives that arrived, Dr.Gonzo now has 1Tb of storage, ph33r my fileserver!

June 27th, 2004

Almost 1 year of the new machines page and I like the way its working out. I added the Ghetto-Colo Status heading above to further help my ever decaying sanity. It just covers the ghetto-colo boxen and laptops, not the rest of the diaspora that is my root access.

June 30th, 2003

I figured it was about time to get over the oddities, idiosyncracies of the machine's page, as well as clean off the poor crates that have been parted out, gutted, stuffed in a closet or turned into a nightstand.

For the sake of sanity, posterity, and humour, here's the original machines page.

The criteria for being on this list is now:

Regularly running.

Has a reason for existence. (I left Gomer on the old list, as well as plugged in, for far too long.)

I have root access.


Internet Hosts

Clockwatching.net

Minnow: Around Decemeber of '04 we noticed that Melchoir was crashing on a pretty weekly basis, so Saneesh and I resolved to do something about it. Then a few months passed as I was junked out on World of Warcrack and Saneesh was distracted by something shiny. Then we had the incident that required an emergency re-install. In a consumerist fit that involved some bourbon at a local bar that happened to have free wireless, I snagged Minnow off of Ebay to replace the near constant yo-yo'ing Melchoir. It's been about a week with Minnow on the job as the 5th Clockwatching server, and aside from 1 daylong hiccup I pray to the grep gods was just a scsi driver issue, I think we're much better off. I had to put up the PayPal button to get some kickback from the expenditure, and was stark raving shitkicking amazed that nearly the whole bill was covered in 6 hours. I also promised that the phatest donation would have the honour of naming the new machine, and that went to Spoon. So here is Minnow:

OS:Slackware 10.1
Chip:Two 800Mhz Pentium 3 Coppermines
RAM:512Mb
Disk:73Gb SCSI RAID 1
Monitors:Nope, None...
Domains:
www.clockwatching.net
www.animalpoems.net
www.boomtime.org
www.brendanmcbryan.com
www.odk.com
www.bloodystupid.org
www.midtownonsite.com
www.mostfct.com
www.atlantaopenlate.com
www.atlantaopenlate.org
www.porchsittingpress.com

Updates: 1-27-04 Found an obscure bug with 2.4.25-pre7 where XFS on a 4k chunk, built on a raid array with a 1k chunk algorithm, freaks out the raid buffer and it keeps juggling back and forth between the two. Since I had to go to the Undisclosed Location to boot it to 2.4.25-pre7, I was a little put out by the fact that it wouldn't work all peachy keen like I thought. Evidently a fix is in the works according to some LKML chatter, but after recreating the bug on Diane, the quickest and easiest fix I could find was just slapping on a 2.6.1 kernel. Well shit, the Clock is now on its 3rd kernel series, having started with 2.2.16. We remote booted into 2.6.1 after a solid test on Diane, still, it takes balls to "boot and pray". I was planning on blaming it all on Saneesh if it didn't work.

3-15-04 A few days prior to the Ides of Clock we dropped a single 1Gig stick into Melchoir and fired it back up. That's about it for nickel and dime upgrades, after this is dual Xeons or something.

8-18-04 Upgraded the shit out of Melchoir's OS, doing an install of Slackware 10.0 on a spare SCSI 18Gb (Thanks again to Twi, who donated Melchoir in the first place >:) It takes a lot to Clockify a base install these days, and there's still stuff here and there that I'm finding is broken. The migration went alright this time, easier then last even, despite the fact I couldn't get Melc to boot from his scsi drive so I just used a spare IDE partition for /boot. That, and the entire time I was at the undisclosed location I had this monster spot cooler blowing freezing air right at my ass.

6-27-05 Slapped Slack 10.1 on Melchoir as an emergency upgrade, then within a week realized it was time to get a new machine, and picked up Minnow, which is an SGI 1200, nearly identical hardware to Melchoir, a VA Fullon 2200.

Clockwatching.org

Wolfwood was my last big computer purchase. Okay, before you start screaming "bullshit" at the top of your lungs, I'm not fucking kidding here, I haven't spent more then $75 for a whole machine since I picked up Wolfwood a year and a half ago for something like $300 off of E-bay. Then I ran around and spent money on a Type 5 keyboard and downloaded Solaris 8 and picked up a Sun monitor only to find that: It came with a freebee keyboard and mouse, and with a pre-install of Solaris 8, and none of the that was on the invoice. The monitor was just me being a dumbass and not knowing that Sun had switched to HD-15 with the Ultra 1. A year ago I stuck OpenBSD on it after a long stint of SuSe 7.3 Sparc edition, after about 5 hours of it running Slow-laris.

OS: OpenBSD 3.7
Chip: 270Mhz UltraSparc IIi
RAM: 256Mb
Disk: 4.8Gb IDE (wooowheee, yeah, this sucks!)
Monitors: 1, 15-inch, that the framebuffer continues to freak out, so I don't even bother to run X.
Domains: www.clockwatching.org
Updates: 11-09-03 Upgraded Wolfwood to OpenBSD 3.4, had to use the miniroot trick yet again, this thing just doesn't like cd-rws. As usual, an OpenBSD version upgrade is just humorously easy.

05-09-04 Upgraded Wolfwood to OpenBSD 3.5, damn I love miniroot!
11-12-04 Upgraded Wolfwood to OpenBSD 3.6, fuckin-A, miniroot still kicks ass.
6-10-05 Upgraded Wolfwood to OpenBSD 3.7, blah blah blah miniroot rules. Blah!


Clockwatching.com

DrGonzo is the product of our need here at the ghetto-colo to rip the crap out of DVDs. We were doing alright with Orwell and then Diane on the job, but 7 hour rip times were just weak! Weak I say! So I picked up this insane beast and was agog at the fact that it POST'ed when I first hooked it up. It's big, its smart... and I hate Gentoo, but until Patrick compiles a native Slackware for x86_64, I'm stuck.

OS:Gentoo
Chip:1.8Ghz AMD Athlon64 3000
RAM:1Gb
Disk: 80Gb Western Digi, 250Gb Western Digi and yep... a 200Gb Western Digi.
Monitors: 1/4 of the KVM of Doom and an S-Video connection to the 29-inch TV using atitvout and VESA framebuffering.
Domains: www.clockwatching.com
Updates: 5-21-05 2x250Gb SATA drives arrived along with the 14xDVD-RW. This is going to get vulgar.


Gaspode

Gaspode is the assemblage of the two machines that Tricky sent me and the old SS10 I bought off of git.ads. It has a crappy 8-bit GLX framebuffer, a buttload of RAM, an unrecognized FDDI NIC, another unrecognized SCSI wide card, and... that's about it. The idea is for this to take over as the house router when Orwell gets decommissioned and Melchoir takes over the job as the Clock. Due to the Cisco FDDI card not being supported, I bought a 100BaseT card off of Ebay for $12. It should be here in a few days. Gaspode took about fourteen hours to compile everything in the ports tree enough to get mozilla-firebird working... yeah, fourteen hours.

OS: NetBSD 2.0rc4
Chip: Dual Ross HyperSparc 90Mhz
RAM: 160Mb
Disk: 9Gb Seagate scsi SCA
Monitors: 1 17-inch Sun Monitor, hand swapped... damn I need a cheap W13J KVM.
Domains: gaspode.clockwatching.org
Updates: 9-21-03 Got the second network card in from Ebay. All ready and set-up to route, just waiting on the colo-space and the drive rails for Melchoir.

4-11-04 After placing a hail mary E-bay bid on a pair of Ross 90Mhz Sparcs I was quite surprised to find that I won the damn auction, so a week or so ago I was greeted with a nice little $10 package. I fought for a while to get NetBSD 1.6.2 to run SMP, later to get NetBSD-current to run, but they haven't gotten around to supporting the HyperSparc in SMP yet so it was off to Debian, which took installing woody and then apt-get'ting to sid, a royal 2 day pain in the ass.

5-09-04 Gaspode now has the job of being the primary DNS server. Yeah, a 10 year old machine running yesterday's 2.4.26 kernel with a pair of Ross HyperSparc chips on Debian's unstable branch is my primary DNS server. Someone called me daring for this... wow, daring got lame didn't it?

11-12-04 I got sick of Debian hiccup'ing all over the kernels I had compiled and constantly booting into a 2.2.twentysomething compile that pre-dated the written word. The downshot was that 2.2 kinda lacks that whole iptables support kinda thing, which unfortunately means that the firewall script doesn't run and Gaspode's ass is exposed to the world in all of its port sniffing glory. If I made the default 2.4, inexplicably the machine hangs on kernel uncompress every fourth time. Well, as I can't make Georgia Power keep the juice rolling like they used to, I figured it was best to give NetBSD another run as they seem to have gotten their shit straight with Ross CPUs with 0 cache. It only took a hand built CD and 2.5 installs... yeah, sure that was worth it... Well, Tenacious has Gaspode's IPs and duties for the time being while I get NetBSD firing on all cylinders, and both processors.

TheDude.clockwatching.org

The Dude is Grant's machine that was two years in the making. This is one of those brand-stinking new crates that sends me reeling with RAM envy. Serial ATA, a BIOS that talks to you, USB 2.0, firewire, an 800Mhz FSB, blah blah blah fucking evil shit fast blah. Well, I had to install on The Dude's SATA drive, connected to an Intel ICH5 SATA controller, which isn't supported in Slack 9's 2.4.20 kernel, nor the 2.4.21 upgraded kernel (well, sorta, but in legacy [read hdparm 5Mb/sec] mode), so I compiled 14 versions of 2.4.21-ac4 and finally got one small enough to take over for the default kernel on a slackware scsi2.s boot floppy. Then I fought with initrd and shit... this isn't a how-to, so I'll wrap it up with: I dropped a marmot in the tub and now The Dude is my Bitch. It also boots into some software from Redmond, but that's not my problem.

OS: Slackware 9.0 / Windows XP Pro
Chip: Pentium 4 2.4Ghz, 800Mhz FSB
RAM: 1Gb (Isn't that fucking sick, I mean a whole damn GIG! Shit man, in '96 Evil Matt and I were swooning over Jer's 1Gb hard drive!)
Disk: 80Gb SATA
Monitors: 1 17-inch (that originally belonged to Tenacious) but the card does 2, Grant's going to buy a 17-inch vanity accessory flatpanel shortly.
Domains: er... thedude.clockwatching.org until his IP changes, gotta learn tsig keys...
Updates: [7-29-03] Grant slowly dropped off all the parts he had borrowed, which makes me feel guilty as all of his from old Wurlitzer are still strewn around the house. He's got his vanity viewscreen now and so I've got to get the nicotine stained old EV700 off of the livingroom floor.


Crates behind a firewall, laptops, etc.

Osiris

Osiris was built for Saneesh out of the guts of about 5 different machines: TheScreamingBrain's motherboard and chip, Ruprecht's RAM and Nic, Orwell's old case, Wurlitzer's old PSU, and Samsara's drives. This was where our naming schema broke down, tested into the ground, we couldn't really agree on what constituted the soul of the machine, so after some jokes about calling it Stein or Frank or Adam (ala Buffy the Vampire Slayer[Season 4 villian], we settled on Leisure's suggestion of Osiris. It took two tries to get Gentoo on it happily. We figured why not just give it the Clock's old IP address while we were at it.

OS: Gentoo 1.4
Chip: Intel Celeron 466Mhz
RAM: 128Mb
Disk: 2x6Gb WDs
Monitors: 1 17-inch, one of the ones that was just lying about.
Domains: None
Updates:

Sidearm

Sidearm was my impulse buy off of Ebay within 24-hours of the sudden demise of Nimble. Alas poor Nimble! Well, Thinkpads cost too much new, but they depreciate at an exponential rate that matches them up to their cheap ass Dell, HP, Compaq and (not as much) Sony counterparts, so when picking up a used laptop, I would be a fool if I didn't buy another Thinkpad. I ranted and raved after Nimble croaked and called my geek friends with their myriad connections to cheap gear, and was even in danger of picking up... dare I mention it, a Mac, when I just hit the FleaBay and went shopping. All day I had been declaring over the phone, "Help me out, I need a new sidearm!", so a name was sort of obvious from the start.

OS: Slackware 10.0
Chip: Pentium 3 900Mhz Coppermine
RAM: 256Mb
Disk: 20Gb
Monitors: 14.1 crisp little TFT
Domains: None, damn thing is a laptop!
Updates:
6-26-04 Wow, didn't take long for Slackware 10.0 to come out so Sidearm got an update. I'm stuck on the horns of a dilema, apm provides a working sleep mode, but under acpi the CPU throttling works correctly whereas when I pull the plug on Sidearm it doesn't work quite right, there's an odd lag to mouse clicks, etc... hardly noticeable, but annoying. I can invest the time to get acpi and suspend working, but I'm pretty fuckin lazy if you haven't noticed. What to do, what to do... Well, the XFree86 4.4 s3savage driver works with X.org's X server, so that was a relief, although its weird not having an XF86Config file for the first time in 3 years. The Port replicator is about useless. I took it to work and it won't successfully let me switch the mouse from the PS-2 connected mose (hooked into the 8 port KVM) and the eraser head when I pull Sidearm off of the replicator. I mean if I whack X, it still thinks /dev/psaux is that port replicated mouse. I can't figure out how to get it to see 2 so I can just add a second entry to x.org.conf (or whatever the fuck XF86Config is now). Yeah, I know... a USB mouse, but then I would have 2 mice at my desk and that's lame, no the KVM doesn't do USB ports and no I'm not getting a USB hub for work, that's even more silly. Here's the real annoyance, when the video is plugged into the replicator, if I've got it switched to the LCD with s3switch (which fucking rules, right up there with atitvout!), or if its switched to the CRT, mplayer -vo xv just displays a blue box. If I take it off the replicator and just plug the CRT into the connector on the ass end of the laptop... works fine on both the CRT and LCD. Wiggedy eh? Sidearm's primary purpose at work is to play DVDs, so this is a little awkward.

Nimble

Nimble has been my trusty little laptop for about 3 years now. It started out with Windows 2k, then Mandrake 8.0, RedHat 7.2, Slackware 8.0, Slackware 8.1, and now OpenBSD 3.3. I've dis-assembled the poor fucker twice, dragged it to a number of cities, abused it with just about every wireless chipset on the market, and through all of this I have come to believe in the hardiness of IBM equipment. It weighs too much, its the size of a friggin' surfboard, its a Thinkpad!

OS: OpenBSD 3.5
Chip: Pentium 3 500Mhz Coppermine
RAM: 128Mb
Disk: 10Gb
Monitors: er... 1, 15-inch I think, its friggin huge!
Domains: None, the fucker is mobile!
Updates: 9-21-03 In a fit of pique I switched Nimble over to FreeBSD 5.1 from the five months or so I had it running OpenBSD. I'm liking Free a lot more then the last time I tried it around 4.5 or so. We'll see, I haven't gone through the ports tree to see if I can get firebird to compile yet.
9-23-03 Oh yeah... I forgot how much FreeBSD hates me. I figured it was time to figure out what these Gentoo freaks were all about.

6-10-04 In the middle of playing the Beastie Boys SureShot, Nimble let out one little click and keeled over. I'm going to be guttin him soon to see if he's resurectible. This will be my first time going into a laptop's guts with no idea what is actually wrong.

9-10-04 Got bored and finally gutted Nimble. One tiny little wire was no longer connected, so one day and a tiny dollop of solder later and old Nimble is back on the job. This little fucker is a warrior. Probably going to OpenBSD it here shortly.

Morphy

Morphy was a loan from Rob to take over for the fact that Nimble ate it when the power pin snapped free of the board about a year ago. Aside from the ballsucking Trident Cyberblade i7 video card that didn't get supported until XFree 4.2.1, its a solid little machine. When Nimble made it back from the shelf, I got the okay from Rob to continue on the loan to Nick, who now lives in the ghetto-colo, and since Nimble runs OpenBSD, this little bastard gets hammered with a lot of wireless fun, recently the ADMtek 8211 and Realtek RTL8180L chipset based cards. A few weeks ago we had about a half-dozen or so Clockwatchers over for some Bourbon and bullshit. Morphy here got handed around the circle a lot as people wanted to take a look at photos in the archive or lookup who played so-and-so in such-and-such on imdb. This spurred me to say, "Hey could you pass over the infobong, its my turn!", and now I'm screwed, as none of us here at the ghetto-colo are canabanoids, but we have a laptop commonly reffered to as the InfoBong. Nimble has since picked up the nickname InfoBlunt.

OS: Slackware 9.1
Chip: AMD K6-3 450Mhz
RAM: 128Mb, and 8 gobbled up by this nut-munching Cyberblade!
Disk: 6Gb
Monitors: 1, little 13-inch TFT
Domains: er... none, unless you count the living room.
Updates: 10-1-03 I just took Morphy up to Slack 9.1, and really, I'm sad to say that I can't tell much of a difference. Everything is just the littlest bit newer.

4-11-04 After the power pin on the InfoBong snapped back in February, it took a while for Saneesh to have the time to put the motherboard back in order. I've now disassembled every damn laptop in this house.
6-26-04 Morphy's ghetto-rigged power-pin setup barfed again, so I dissasembled it and stuck it in a drawer. I'm not taking it off the list as I did with Nimble because this is a pretty brief setback. I'll be surprised if I wait until Saneesh makes it back from vacation.

Earth

Earth is the last of the Nine. Saneesh picked up 9 laptops from his Father's girlfriend's company before they hit a dumpster. We only really fiddled with five of them, one of two matching Texas Instruments (Saturn and Jupiter), and three of the four matching LapNotes (Earth, Mars, Venus, and Mercury). Earth recently got the 3Gb drive out of the gutted Toshiba (Neptune), and a fresh install of Slackware 9.0, then a kernel upgrade via Tyler, and a pcmcia-cs compile as yenta_socket can't handle a Cirrus pcmcia bridge. This is all so that the Grand Wireless Experiment from two years ago can be rekindled as my co-worker Joel wants to try and get connected to the GT wireless network from off-campus via a 20Db gain yagi antenna he's getting off of Ebay. We'll see... its bound to be fun at least.

OS: Slackware 9.0
Chip: Pentium 1 133Mhz
RAM: 24Mb (yeah, that's right, 24! a it runs X! Really crappily and Firebird horks, but it runs!)
Disk: 3Gb
Monitors: 1, er... 12-inch TFT
Domains: None yet, but who knows... maybe after some tsig key madness.
Updates:

Tyler/Jack

Jack/Tyler I built about three years ago this coming January. It started out as a 1Ghz Slot A T-Bird, but that didn't work out so an RMA or four later and it was a 1.2Ghz Socket A T-bird. Its been through the ringer: windows 98, Slackware 7.1, 8.0, 8.1, and now 9.0 with some stops over with RedHat 7.0, 7.2, 8.0, FreeBSD 4.4 and a brief LFS that never ran much... which I should try again. Now it just dual boots Slowlaris 9 x86 and Slackware 9.0. The machine is friggin Hydra, every time I get cut down by boredom, Tyler gets another Monitor or OS. Right now I'm down to 3 and 2 respectively. I don't know what I'm going to do to this little warrior that's been through 4 video cards, 2 scsi card, 5 monitors, a dozen OSes, 4 CD/DVD drives, (but only one hard drive). In January its going to be about time to buy a new desktop uber-fucker, a new "pimp chip". The AMD Athlon64 should be rationally priced by then, and thanks to Grant I have newfound respect for Nvidia cards. This is going to be fun. Until then Jack keeps rockin' with a 3840x1024 screenshot.

OS: Gentoo 1.4
Chip: AMD Thunderbird 1.2Ghz Athlon
RAM: 512Mb (been up to 768Mb before... never noticed the downgrade)
Disk: 1 40Gb Maxtor
Monitors: 3, 2 19-inch matching Samsungs and 1 19-inch Dynatron. Really, really sick!
Domains: nope, none...
Updates: 11-10-03 Switched over to Gentoo, doing one big fat emerge now, genkernel created a hanger on me, so I hand compiled one before work today. Bye-bye Slowlaris too... never could get it to boot right...

CaptainEd

Captain Ed I picked up at LWE for about $50 from some third-hand computer kit shop somewhere in or around Silicon Valley. Its a fun little beast. I had to borrow a copy of Irix from twitch, then hook up one of these ancient scsi CDROMs that Saneesh brought by and I had been using as jumper farms. It only took about two days, but I finally got it running ssh and apache and some other non-archaic services. Heck, Freeware at SGI even had a recent build of Mozilla's Firebird that installed on it. I have no idea what I'm going to do with the thing next, but hopefully something. Right now its sitting on top of Tenacious, open-cased as the only scsi-2 cable I have has 2 connectors and I can't figure out how to jumper the hard drive alone to terminate.

OS: Irix 6.5.3
Chip: SGI Mips RS4600 133Mhz
RAM: 32Mb
Disk: 4Gb beast of a Seagate, scsi-2
Monitors: 1 17-inch Sun Monitor
Domains: None
Updates: 9-16-03 I turned on some port forwarding so the webserver running on this little guy is visible: CaptainEd. I also dropped $10 on a little damn Scsi-2 active terminator. Hopefully the drive won't get so hot as to melt the case, but its pretty damn warm. Also, Indy Cams are about $5 on Ebay, so there's some apartment chatter about having CoffeeCam!

Grumpy

Grumpy is the machine I was handed at work. Actually, was handed three dust cover relics and informed, "build something", so I set about figuring out which was the quickest, best video card, etc. Then I scavenged around the office for PC100 SDRAM and found 2Gigs over 3 sticks. Too bad this damn thing only recognizes .5Gb, but I might get around to flashing the BIOS and see if that helps. Its CPU fan emits a wheezing noise, its not a happy little machine. Every day at work I always manage to kick it by accident. Yeah, that's an accident alright.

OS: Slackware 9.1
Chip: Pentium II 300Mhz
RAM: 512Mb
Disk: 8Gb Something or other
Monitors: 1 17-inch Sampo POS, and some other no-name 17-inch.
Domains: None.
Updates:
6-19-04 I actually snagged the second monitor and I think this thing is now running on a Matrox G400 and an S3 Trio or somesuch, its been a while since I bothered with an /sbin/lspci. The little bugger won't die, I'll give it that. Its now hooked up to this monster 8-port KVM so I can break things without having to leave my desk. Also I managed to squirrel away a DVD-rom, which makes it the world's crappiest DVD player.

Tom

Tom is one of three old echostar boxen that Saneesh scored from work. Some retired, never quite ready for prime time player. We had rumblings of building a Beowulf cluster, but as no one we know has actually gotten around to doing that, we didn't want to break the trend. In true Great Escape tradition, Dick and Harry are sitting un-used off to the side.Well, Saneesh needed a Windows machine around for Spice, some evil EE crap for Tech, so we came up with the ground rules:

The machine shall not be booted when the sun is out. Let not the blue screen mar the light of day.

The machine may not be connected to the network for more then 1 hour at a time. If so we've got to cleanse the network and live chickens are expensive.

The machine is a toy damnit, and I need a copy of something like StarCrack...

OS: Windows 2000
Chip: Celeron 433Mhz
RAM: 128Mb
Disk: 20Gb
Monitors: 1 17-inch old beaten down Gateway EV700 shared with Diane.
Domains: None... oh my no.
Updates: