malada

There's the old Novell server room at work. The order has gone out that it's to be cleared out and everything in it thrown away. The Novell system was ditched around 2012.

They let me have dibs.

What I've already looted: operating system DVDs and manuals, lots of loose CAT 5 cables, two desktops and a Mac Powerbook from 2010, some loose hard drives, two 4x3 flatscreen monitors and some odds and ends.

What I *won't* be taking is the 3 or 4 old Novell servers and the off-line data server. I don't take equipment that I can't lift and I definitely can't lift those puppies. I won't be taking the boxes of backup tapes that went with the servers or the APC battery backups - they're probably dead and I can't lift them.

I'm leaving the two - eight port KVM switches. The older ones can't handle resolutions over 800x600.

However, there is a pile of around two dozen USB IOmega external hard drives. I've tested a few of them and they're usage dates between 2011 - 2012. They have one terarbyte hard drives in them. So, they're over ten years old but have fairly low usage.

I can still look at the data - it uses some program called VERITAS to back up things. I haven't tried reading them.

I'm not sure what I'd do with two dozen external 1 terabyte hard drives but I'd hate to see them just go to the dump. If I take them I'll DBAN them, create new partition tables and format them - probably in NTFS (Windows). Most are missing their little power supplies and USB cables so I suspect that they were either tossed or there's a stash of them... somewhere.

Thoughts?

In my last post I talked about an old desktop that had been a bit of a pain to work with and now that I had it working again, what I was going to do with it.

In a way, it was my own fault: I trusted the Internet. The beastie is the Dell Optiplex 410 and I found a some forum posts that said it could handle a quad core Q6700 CPU and 8 gigs of memory, when it's spec'ed to max out with a dual core E6700 and 4 gigs of memory.

Yeah... forum post was... optimistic. Mine booted with a Q6600 which is a little slower than the Q6700 and with 6 gigs of memory... but it never lasted long before becoming unstable.

After 'downgrading' it to the proper limits it seems fine... then the DVD went south.

I finally found one spare DVD drive and got it working again... but the project I had planned for it was transferred to a beefier Super Potato. So what do I do with this POS?

I regularly check the Haiku OS website. Haiku OS is an open source fork of the old BEOS. I've played with the Beta 3 versions and the nightly builds and it looks very promising. In the forums they posted an announcement for their Beta 4 release candidate - both 32 bit and 64 bit versions.

Testing weird operating systems? Sign me up!

I've got 4.. 5.. maybe 6 lovable loser computers I can load up Haiku on and give it a work out. These range from a single core AMD to a Super Potato running a quad core Intel. This also gives me more content for my Youtube channel Malada Media Labs. No sponsors, no patreon, not a whole lot of content... mostly me resurrecting junked systems. I film with a cellphone, edit everything in Linux, even create my own music for the channel. It scratches my creative itch along with my techie itch.

-m