Well, after a LOT of work, I think I’ve got everything moved over from the old Dual Athlon-MP 1600 server that has been running in my living room for over 2 years. The need to move to a colocated server was pretty obvious, as this computer was showing those unmistakable signs of death.
For the past year the computer had been down only twice, and each time it took a minor miracle to get it to simply turn back on. Last night I pulled everything apart—every card and memory DIMM and cable and drive and even the motherboard—and cleanly and carefully put it all back together, hoping the awful noise that had started up and the restart problems would go away. I still haven’t managed to get it to power up.
Now to figure out what to do with the machine. There are a number of decent parts that I’d hate to throw away. The case is a really beautiful Lian Li (with the side window), there’s a SCSI160 card and “LV Multi-media hard drive” that used to be really expensive and probably still have some decent value. And there’s a DDR266 512 Megabyte RAM chip.
Actually, I could probably buy a brand new Duron/Sempron motherboard for $90 that could take the memory, and it would seem like a brand new mid-range computer… that I don’t really need.
Under normal circumstances this would get passed down the chain of hand-me-downs in my family—I have been constantly passing down used computers and laptops to other family members—but now I’m moving the family to Macintosh, so that’s a dead end too. We’ll have to see.
It’s been a good computer. It has served many tens of thousands of web pages, working non-stop for years. I feel bad about its death, which is perhaps why I’m taking the time to write this little eulogy.
