Fractal's Fractured System Bonepile

Standby is a hand-me-down from the family computer that I built several years ago based on reviews on the net. It is the one that kept locking up on my wife but now serves me just fine. It consists of an Abit TX5 motherboard, an AMD K6-266 @ 300 and 2 x 32meg PC66 SDRAM. Standby was last seen running an old version of Linux so I could build code to run on a remote computer. It was retired when the mud was moved to a machine running a modern version of Linux.

Albert is my public web/mail server that is hiding under a workbench at my parents house on their DSL. It has gone through various configurations over the years. I recently retired a version that consists of a generic TX motherboard, an AMD K5/166 cpu with 16 meg of ram, a seagate ST34310A 4 gig ide hard drive and 3com 3c509 net card in a generic 29 dollar frys special minitower case when it having issues recovering from power failures so I took the oportunity to upgrade to a more modern platform.

Brutus is a monster of a machine I bought to host several muds. It consists of a Dell PowerEdge 4200 with dual 300 Mhz processors, dual hot swap 700 watt powersupplies and six hot swap scsi drives. I have two 4 gig drives striped to boot and four 9 gig drives in a raid 5 stripe for user data. The system came with a DDS3 tape drive that nicely matches the capacity of the raid5 stripe. Weighing in at just under 100 pounds, this box is definately a gut buster but is ideally suited for its purpose ... an ultra reliable server for running muds. My only complaint to date is that the Dell raid controller is a major dog. I thought it would be a good reliable box but the performance penalty of the ancient PERC controller is intollerable. The only problems with it were that it was big, it was loud and it was costing me close to 35 dollars a month in electricity to run. It was replaced by a 2u rack mount box and Brutus is resting comfortably in the garage.

I retired the old SparcStation IPX from service as my secondary DNS server. It now sits in the bonepile

My old router was pieces of computers I found in the garage. It is a 486/33 in some funky VLB motherboard with a VLB video card, a mix of 72 and 36 pin memory, an old maxtor 7456AT hard drive and a NE clone lan card complete this system in a generic full tower AT case. It currently provides NAT and firewall services for the house. The fan on the processor recently gave out so I have the case open at a 45 degree angle and a 'doesn't quite fit' fan on it. Replacing this system with an appliance type pc is moving higher up on my list every day.

Other systems in various states of decay include an Ampro littleboard Z80 system I used extensively in college and Blue Baby, an Imsai 8080 I bought as a kit from the original Byte Shop in 1978. I still turn it on every few years just to watch the blinking lights.

Duron (yeah, createive name) was my primary windows workstation and consists of an 800 MHz Duron processor on a MSI K7T PRO2a motherboard. Duron had a FOP 32-1 HSF and lived in an Antec SX-830 case with lots of cooling. Duron was retired when it broke.

Mozo was my video editing system and consists of a Tyan Trinity 400, 600 MHz celeron, 128mb ram, Matrox Mystique 220 PCI video, Matrox Rainbow Runner video capture card, Turtle Beach Montego sound, Conner 1280 system disc, maxtor 6gig data disc and an ibm 75gxp/20 video disc in a addtronics 6896a case. Mozo was retired after less than a year of use due to unstability.

My old home server was another hand-me-down from the family computer that we bought from Belmont Computer Proucts many years ago. It consisted of a Gold Star MP064 Triton motherboard, Pentium 120 cpu, 32 meg FP ram, 32 meg EDO ram, in a generic case. It was retired after many years of service to make room for other systems in the cramped lab.