The system is powered by an Intel Pentium III/550, with 128 megabytes main memory and 512KB cache. Mass storage consists of an IBM DORS-32160 Ultrastar ES 2.1GB SCSI hard disk for the system and apps, a Micropolis 1991AV 9GB SCSI hard disk for file storage, a Seagate ST34550W 4.3GB wide SCSI drive for video workspace, on a Diamond Fireport 40 bismastering PCI wide SCSI controller, and a Pioneer 24X SCSI CD-ROM, a Hewlett-Packard SureStore 6020i CD writer, an Iomega SCSI Zip removable disk drive, and an HP SCSI 4mm DAT tape drive, all driven by a generic Symbios 53C810 busmaster SCSI interface. There's also a 3-1/2 inch floppy disk for completeness.
The video board is an ELSA GLoria Synergy PCI with 8 MB SGRAM, connected to a Sony Multiscan 17sf-I 17 inch monitor. I run it at 1152x864, in 24-bit color mode. Other peripherals include a Linksys 10BaseT PCI Ethernet adapter, a Pinnacle Systems miroVideo DC20 video capture board, an HP PhotoSmart 35mm film scanner, and a Microtek Scanmaker E3 flatbed scanner.
The system runs Windows NT Server 4.0. I use Adaptec's EZ-CD Pro 2.0 for CD writing, Adobe Photoshop 5.1 for general scanning and editing, Ed Hamrick's VueSmart 4.1 for film scanning, and Adobe Premiere 5.1 for video work. I also have a wide array of other applications software loaded, most of which I don't use much.
I used to run OS/2, all the way though version 4. I wish I still could. The idea of running any form of Microsoft Windows fills me with a vague sense of nausea. Unfortunately, the dwindling support for OS/2 by hardware manufacturers, coupled with an increasing amount of software that requires Windows XCV or NT version 4 to run, forced me to change. (If you're wondering what XCV is, try decoding it as Roman numerals.) IBM had a great thing on their hands and screwed it up with a particularly inept marketing strategy.
This system has a 500 MHz Alpha 21164 CPU, 128 megabytes main memory, and a 512KB cache. For mass storage, it has a Conner CFP540S and a TEAC CD-532S 32X SCSI CD-ROM, driven by a NCR/Symbios Logic 53C810 PCI busmaster SCSI controller.; a second SCSI controller, this one a 53C825, drives two IBM 0664-N1H fast/wide drives. There's also a 3-1/2 inch floppy disk.
The video board is a Diamond Stealth 3D 3000 graphics adapter with 4 MB RAM, running at 1280x1024x16-bit color. The net adapter is an Intel EtherExpress Pro/100.
This system has Red Hat Linux 6.1 installed. It provides local network services for my little network (but not DNS any more, due to a nasty and exceedingly stupid breakage in IRIX 6.5.x's resolver), as well as serving the NFS-mounted system disk for NetBSD/VAX development.
This machine has an Intel Pentium II 266 CPU, with 64 MB of RAM. Mass storage is a 6GB IDE hard disk, a 24x CD-ROM, and a floppy drive, all standard for the machine.
Video is provided by an S3 ViRGE/MX accelerated graphics controller and a 1Kx768 active matrix LCD with 64K colors. Connectivity is through a built-in 56K faxmodem, and a Linksys EC2T NE2000-compatible Ethernet card.
This system has a dual personality: as yakko, it runs Windows 2000 Professional. I have most of the same software loaded on this box as I do on dot, so I can do stuff at home or away. As wakko, it runs Red Hat Linux 6.1.
This is a moderately powerful system as SGIs go. It has a MIPS R4400/150 CPU and 128 MB RAM, a Seagate ST34520N 4 GB hard disk, an NEC 6Xe CD-ROM, and a very nice Sony GDM-20D11 20-inch monitor driven by the Indigo 2's XZ Extreme graphics hardware. The sound hardware drives an Altec Lansing ACS-45 powered speaker system.
I'm currently running IRIX 6.5.4m on this system. The 4D window manager has won me over; it's good looking, easy to deal with, and Just Works, unlike a lot of others (including OSF/CDE, which has some serious breakages in dtterm, among other things). This is the machine I spend most of my time sitting in front of; it always has Netscape and at least 4 telnet windows open, and usually has an MP3 going in the background.
The CPU in this system is a KA670, powered by a Rigel-series chip running at 143 MHz. This gives it about 8 times the speed of a VAX-11/780. Memory is on one MS670-BA memory board, with 32 MB. Mass storage consists of two RF31E DSSI disks, 390 MB each, and two RF30E DSSI disks, 150 MB each; a TK70 tape drive, 290 MB, with TQK70 controller; and a KZQSA SCSI controller, connected to an RRD40 single-speed CD-ROM (which uses weird, nonstandard caddies). Serial connectivity comes courtesy of a CXY08 8-port multiplexer. The console is a VT420 CRT.
This system runs OpenVMS 6.2, under the DEC OpenVMS Hobbyist License Agreement [ http://www.montagar.com/hobbyist/index.html ]. In my copious free time, I'm porting NetBSD/VAX [ http://www.netbsd.org ] to it.
This system has an Intel Pentium 166 CPU, 96 megabytes main memory, and 256KB cache. For mass storage, it has an IBM/Maxtor MXT540S 540 MB SCSI hard disk, a Conner CFP1060S 1 GB SCSI hard disk, an NEC 6Xi SCSI 6X CD-ROM, and an Archive 4456 4mm DAT tape drive, all hooked up to a generic NCR/Symbios Logic 53C810 PCI busmaster SCSI controller. There's also the requisite 3-1/2 inch floppy disk drive. The rest of the system is a generic S3 Trio64 PCI video board with 2 MB RAM and a no-name NE2000 clone Ethernet board.
This system gets used as a playground. I currently have NetBSD 1.3.2 and Solaris 2.6 installed, but that's just the configuration of the moment. It used to be the production Linux server until I got the Alpha.
This system has a Pentium II/400 CPU, 128 megabytes main memory, and 256KB cache. For mass storage, it has a Western Digital 6GB IDE hard disk and an I/O Magic 44x IDE CD-ROM. There's also the requisite 3-1/2 inch floppy disk drive. The rest of the system is an ELSA Victory Erazor video board with 4 MB VRAM and a no-name NE2000 clone Ethernet board.
I built this machine up after replacing dot's CPU because I got tired of games that wouldn't run, or run well, on NT. It galls me to have to run XCV++.
This system is based on the MIPS R3000/40 CPU, with 96 MB of RAM and a Seagate ST1480N 425 MB hard disk. It doesn't have any workstation-type hardware, like video or keyboard, installed.
This system has no other purpose in life than running the elmyra.wtower.com IRC server, a member of the WTnet IRC network [ http://www.wtower.com/ ]. It runs a somewhat modified DALnet 4.4.12 IRC daemon on NetBSD 1.4.
This system is a Pentium 166 with 24 MB of RAM and a 1.2 GB Seagate IDE hard disk. The only fancy hardware is a dual Intel EtherExpress Pro/100, so I can connect the ADSL modem to the firewall directly and still keep the internal traffic separate.
I use the built-in firewall facilities in the Linux kernel to do network address translation, firewall protection, and directing incoming traffic to different machines based on the port number. It's a bare-bones Red Hat 6.1 installation.
This system has 4 Pentium Pro 200 CPUs and 384 MB of RAM. It has eight SCSI disk drives on two SCSI buses, both attached to a Compaq SMART Array 4200 RAID controller, for best I/O performance and truly huge capacity. It has only the standard Cirrus Logic built-in video, but since I don't use that machine's console directly, it's not an issue. A Compaq Netelligent 10/100 Ethernet card is the only other piece of hardware in the box.
This machine is used as a virtual IBM System/370 development environment. On top of a stock Red Hat 6.1, I've installed the Hercules [ http://www.conmicro.cx/hercules ] System/370 emulator, and am currently running OS/360 MVT on that. I plan to upgrade to MVS 3.8I whenever the Hercules group figures out how to do that. This is the system I did most of the development for the OS/360 on Hercules [ http://www.conmicro.cx/hercos360 ] page on, and the system I do ongiong Hercules maintenance on.
This system has an 80 MHz PowerPC CPU and 128 MB of RAM for RS/6000, and the P/390 board is an IBM ESA/390-compatible CPU which has its own 128 MB of RAM. Three SCSI hard disks, of 4, 4, and 9 GB capacities. It has no video at all; the console is a VT420 shared with Elmyra. There are two Ethernet boards installed, one for AIX, one for the OS running on the P/390 (which needs its own).
I have AIX 4.3.2 installed on this box. The P/390 host software emulates mainframe devices using AIX facilities. I use this system to see how a real IBM box behaves, then use that knowledge to make Hercules work the same way.
All of these systems are run as experimental boxes, and are subject to reconfiguration at a moment's notice.
This box is another one using the MIPS R3000 CPU. It's the development system for software that winds up on elmyra.
Like plotz, these are VAX-architecture systems; I keep them around to play with VMS when plotz is trying to run NetBSD.
This is my Alpha playground system. It was the Linux server until I got the 500 MHz board.
This machine was the primary NT domain controller for my LAN until it started throwing machine checks frequently. It'll do it again, too, if I can replace three resistor packs known to be a problem on these boxes.
I got this one for ridiculously cheap, and decided to see what SGI was all about.
This came along fairly cheap, and I needed to learn about HP/UX for my professional enrichment. (Yeah, okkay, it's a fancy excuse for getting another box to play with.)
Yet another cheap box. OS/400 isn't cheap, though...
Your basic knockabout laptop. Nothing to write home about, but usable as a dialup terminal.
My network also contains a few devices for specific purposes. In general, I believe in offloading work to dedicated hardware when it would otherwise get in the way of a real computer getting things done.
An Intel NetPort Express XL print server, runt, drives an HP LaserJet 5L and an Epson Stylus Color 640. The box works well when configured for the lpr print protocol, with spooling handled by dot.
I use a Xyplex MAXserver 4550, with four 8-port terminal server cards, to do serial connectivity. I don't need all 32 ports, but the box was cheap. It uses thebrain as its load and parameter server, via bootp and tftp. Each card has a separate IP address, so four names are used: bobby, pesto, squit, and godpigeon.
It should be obvious by now that I'm a firm believer in SCSI. There are two reasons behind this: 1) It just works. Wanna add another disk? Just plug it in and tell the OS about it. No drive parameters to mess with, no master/slave incompatibilities, no messing around. 2) Performance. SCSI beats the pants off of IDE, even the latest and greatest Ultra 33 DMA, for a simple reason: The CPU can tell the drive what it wants and then go on and do something else. This is essential for a multitasking OS such as NT or Linux. Basically, I won't build a system on an IDE mass storage base. The biggest irritant about yakko (the Armada) is that, when the IDE disk is being heavily used, response time for the rest of the system goes to pot.
In case you're wondering, all of the computers are named after characters from Animaniacs, with each one's name chosen for some attribute the computer and the character share in common.
Jay Maynard, jmaynard@conmicro.cxLast updated 30 September 2000
Copyright 2000