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unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Unixronin

December 2012

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Saturday, August 7th, 2004 07:32 pm

With the aid of [livejournal.com profile] captoblivion, we made a roundtrip to Virginia Beach and hauled back a truckload of free hardware.  [livejournal.com profile] darthgeek was scheduled to be bringing his van, but his wife and daughter came down sick yesterday and he couldn't make it.  Fortunately, through ingenuity, mindless exertion and generous application of ratchet tie-downs, we managed to get everything into and safely secured in [livejournal.com profile] captoblivion's pickup.  We scored two Digital 72" full-cabinet racks, three Alphaserver 4000s (at least one of which is incomplete, but at least one looks runnable), and 10 DEC Storageworks disk arrays, all for the effort of loading and unloading them.  We mainly wanted the racks.  The included Alpha hardware is gravy.

Said loading took us about two hours.  Unloading them and getting them into the trailer took almost four hours, including paring down the surface of the front deck with a hatchet (the trailer's subsiding faster than the deck is) and removing a large chunk of the deck railing to that we could get the front screen door open all the way, instead of it hitting the rail at 60° opening.  (It was a really stupidly designed railing.  We may or may not replace it with a better one.)

I'll take a full inventory tomorrow or Monday,  Right now, I'm exhausted.


Update:

Saturday, August 7th, 2004 04:58 pm (UTC)
Naah... I'm pretty sure a bunch of racks full of Alphaserver 4000s get their collective clocks cleaned by a modern Athlon 64 or two. I don't think you go after a bunch of racks of DEC hardware because you need the horsepower...

On the other hand, when it's all set up, he should have a bigger electric bill than God. :)

-JDF
Saturday, August 7th, 2004 05:07 pm (UTC)
Only if we're crazy enough to actually try to run it all. :)

(I figure I'll see what I can stuff into the one best-looking 4000 and see if I can get it working with one disk array to boot from, so I can use it to learn Tru64 on. We mainly wanted the racks, so that I can rack a bunch of the stuff I already have and reclaim some space.)
Saturday, August 7th, 2004 05:22 pm (UTC)
I've got one of the mini-desktop Alphas in storage; one of these years I'll figure out how to boot the damn thing and put Debian or OpenBSD on it.... unless somebody else gets into the area and decides he wants more Alphas.. :)

Nice icon, JD. :)
Saturday, August 7th, 2004 09:06 pm (UTC)
Could probably actually afford to run that. ;)