Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

The bad: pain too bad for codeine to fix[1] -- ow -- so no 3LF for me. Making my way back downstairs for a bite of dinner was very difficult.

The good: I feel like I accomplished something -- no net space savings yet with just one component (the switch) screwed into the rack, but it's a visible sign of progress (and hey, bonus, the blinkenlights are facing in an easier-to-see direction now).

The next obvious machine to move there is the gateway[2], but it's a 486 in an ancient AT-style case (that is, the same footprint as a PC/XT case but taller and with a vertical front), so it's too wide to fit between the rack rails. So I'm going to have to finally get around to configuring a faster machine in a smaller case to replace it. (Or maybe I could just put it on the shelf crossways, which wouldn't look tidy but should fit...)

Upgrading a 486/66 to (probably) a Pentium/350 just to get a smaller footprint when the job that machine does isn't enough to strain the 486 feels funny to me. But I'd been planning to upgrade anyhow in case the newer kernel I want to use -- to handle port forwarding better and for VPN and IPv6 support -- didn't like a 486. So this is also clearly the time for me to get around to borrowing the clamp-on ammeter a friend offerred to lend me so I can see which consumes more electricity, the faster, more oomphy machine, or the one made with older, possibly less efficient tech. I've gotten a large handful of machines faster than most of the machines I'm already using, and need to get around to seeing which ones work, getting disk drives into them, and setting them up to replace my older hardware. Reclaiming enough work space to be have room to start opening them up and tinkering will be a start.

I'm guessing that plotting power consumption vs. speed (or possibly power consumption vs. year of manufacture) will yield a graph that increases up to some point and then starts falling off as "green" became a selling point; I'm interested in finding out whether that guess is correct, and also whether the newest machines I can get ahold of wind up using less energy than my oldest still-useable (for Linux at least) computers. And, for that matter, how the newest, well beyond my economic reach, machines compare. I haven't had the patience to wade through Google looking for a detailed answer; hooking up the machines in the house to a meter seems more straightforward even if it'll probably mean fewer data points than digging up a study someone else has already done.

[1] Well it did have some effect; the pain moved about four inches higher on my back from where it started, making it slightly easier to walk.

[2] That's its function, not a brand name. That box, stjoan, is supposed to be the internal firewall, but when the box that had been the external gateway (eon, aka beaumont) ate its IDE controller (or the motherboard ate itself; I'm not certain, but the error message says it can't see the disk controller) I attached stjoan to the modem "temporarily" and later to the broadband antenna, and my to-do list has had "replace eon" on it for quite some time. Anyhow, I figure it makes sense to mount the switch because it has rack-mount ears, and it makes sense to rack the gateway and/or firewall because they logically go with the switch. But if they'll all fit, I'll squeeze the name server and file server and maybe the main shell/X-app box in there as well, and that'll be most of the downstairs machines except the Suns. I haven't gotten around to whipping out the tape measure to see how many boxes will fit yet; whatever doesn't will just go on a table or desk next to the rack.

Urk. Sleepy and distracted, between the caffeine (in the codeine) and the pain; adding that second footnote, it just took me three minutes of banging the escape key and wondering why my commands kept showing up as inserted characters before I finally remembered that a text-entry box in a web browser is not 'vi'. "Silly machine, isn't it obvious to every app what I mean when I type '[escape]bbbbi'? Oh wait, my bad."