Well, let's see.
I've had one infant-mortality on the new babylon5, the Gigabyte Radeon HD4350 video card, which ceased to output video on DVI after two weeks of life. I replaced that with an XFX HD5570 card that was on sale, and will be sending the Gigabyte card off for repair under warranty (then probably keep it as a spare, lacking another PCI-Express machine to put it in). The replacement card also displays the symptom of screen image downscaled to about 95% when using the HDMI connection to the Asus 27" LCD monitor, which means that's probably a glitch in the monitor that I'll have to bother Asus about, after the 28" Hanns-G comes back from its third round of warranty repair (this time to repair the permanently-stuck-on red column driver at about column 600). I'll still probably put it back on babylon5 after it comes back, because I've discovered that I really miss that extra 120 pixel rows of screen real-estate. (The Asus is 1920x1080; the Hanns-G is pretty close to the only 1920x1200 monitor left in existence in the 27"-28" size range.)
Annoyingly, after I found tall-enough (and cheap!) VESA monitor mounts at Monoprice, I realized that while the Asus has 100x100 VESA mounting points the same as almost all of the mounting arms on the market, the Hanns-G has only 100x200 mounting points. Fortunately, I found an adapter plate online this morning, which saves me from having to make one, to do a decent job of which I'd need access to a machine shop.
I have reasonable confidence at this point that I've gotten everything I need off excalibur, the old babylon5, and can safely wipe it and shut it down. Not sure yet what I'll do with the old hardware. It's a single-core AthlonXP 2400+ on an Asus motherboard which is maxed out at 3GB of RAM (the new machine, also on an Asus board, is only half populated at 8GB), and on which I've already replaced all the power smoothing capacitors after the leaked, and an Intel-MegaRAID-based LSI Logic SATA-RAID controller because that was the only way I could get it to boot off SATA after the last of its SCSI disks failed.
(New babylon5 has mirrored SATA-2 SSDs, and they are truly stunningly fast. How do you like the sound of 2.17 wall-clock seconds to create a 1GB file?)
Also on the hardware front, I just replaced the HP R3000XR UPS we've been running on for the past two years or so with an APC SU3000RMXL. I was already sick and tired of the R3000XR's bizarre battery charge behavior¹, and when it stopped responding on its serial monitoring port, that was the final straw. Now I just need to find my APC SmartUPS serial cables and compile apcupsd on babylon4.
Still in the queue: two older Windows boxes² that have undemanding jobs to be replaced by low-power dual-core Atom boxes for the Pirate and Wen, and Valkyrie's desktop-case Dell GXP150 to be replaced (the plan is for her to get the current vorlon after it gets upgraded to maximum RAM, an Athlon64 X2 processor, and a reasonably recent video card). On the infrastructure side, the main server needs a lot more RAM and an entire new rack of disks (and could use more CPU, but that's a separate problem), and the DB server also needs more RAM. Then we'll be in pretty good shape again except for wireless and laptops. Especially if I can replace the missing rackmount ear for my gigabit switch without having to pay Dell's prices for it (they want as much for a replacement rackmount kit as it would cost me to buy a whole new gigabit switch).
It appears we're even going to be able to get rid of our balky Color Laserjet 4500DN, which seems to have given up the ghost during the couple of weeks it just spent out in the unheated deckhouse. We received an inquiry about whether we'd be interested in donating it for parts. Yes, certainly. Can I interest you in a 3KVA HP UPS as well...?
[1] Left to itself, it would fully charge its battery pack to 100%, hold it there for 48 hours almost exactly, crash-drain it to just below 50%, gradually drain it further down to 40% charge over a period of about twelve hours, then maintain it at around 40% charge for about 32 days give or take a few hours. Then it would charge it back to 100% and do the same thing all over again. Plus, it took herculean efforts and about ten minutes reading and re-reading of the operators' manual every time to get the damned thing to power down. HPaq = UPS FAIL.
[2] One is a Pentium-III, I think; the other a single-core AthlonXP 1500+ even older than excalibur, which — worse yet — is running at only three-quarter speed because it has PC100 RAM instead of the PC133 it should have, but is so old and slow it's not worth fixing.