Computers, As Promised

And it's still technically tomorrow.

The good news is that I've managed to scrounge together one fairly respectable dual 500MHz PIII machine with a gig of ECC RAM (an ex-server of my dad's). Only a 20GB drive in but that can change later (and I've got it all free, so who am I to complain?) and will certainly do for Subversion and OddJoth hosting (at least for the time being).

The bad news is that it's not quite ready to run headless. I'm guessing that this is due to the lack of a keyboard (No keyboard detected, press F1 to continue) which I should really have tested out previously. However, as I'm network socket limited in my room, I wanted my brother to plug it in in his room (and he had to get up in the morning, meaning he was going to bed a lot earlier than this). I was hoping to be able to set off the execrably slow process of emerging new versions of everything that is on there to begin with (as I could do with that being completed in time for me to transfer the various doodads across without having to do it entirely via the Internet) but 12 hours is unlikely to have made much of a dent in it...

Having started with so much potential stuff this evening (4 motherboards, 4 processors, 2 cases, 2 PSUs, 3 sticks of RAM), it has been somewhat disappointing how much stuff I've had to get rid of. 1 motherboard was known bad, 1 case turned out to be bad, 1 PSU turned out to be bad, 1 motherboard turned out to be bad, 1 mobo is looking to be bad (though I decided to call it a night before I could check a number of things, so there's hope). The latter motherboard is a Socket 462 for which I have 2 CPUs, both Athlon XPs, 2400+ and 1800+ so I'm hoping I was doing something stupid/hooking something up wrong in my tiredness, because it would be a shame to lose it.

The machine showing the most potential is using the motherboard originally in the bad case (hence its lack of testing thus far) which is a PIII 450MHz with a hodgepodge of RAM, up to a maximum of 256MB of PC133 stuff (though with a bus frequency of 100MHz, that'll be somewhat wasted).

Nonetheless, I have the server I wanted and, hopefully, the beginnings of distributed computing cluster of some sort. If anyone lives in the Peterborough area and is getting rid of computer stuff (even if it's because it's broken) old or new, I would be more than interested in taking it off your hands (though get in quick or wait until December, as I'll be at uni).