[conspire] Old hardware, ridiculously old hardware: free RAM for you

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> I have found that the blue painter's tape and a permanent marking pen
> can make labels that even hold up for a season in the garden.  Not as
> elegant as a real label maker, but it doesn't require fresh batteries
> at inconvenient times.

Painter's tape and gaffer tape (gaffer tape doesn't leave residue, and
painter's tape leaves very little) are useful but don't really adhere
solidly enough, IMO, for labeling computer systems.  The labels produced
by label machines are extremely clear and adhere well.

That's appropriate for, say, putting 'IPMI - do not use' near the LAN3 
RJ45 port (horrific security problem I noted upthread), and other
labeling of hardware features deemed non-obvious, but in my view what'll
be really wanted is a detailed inventory of chipsets, other parts and
machine capabilities, and what Linux drivers the chipsets use.  (I am
increasingly of the mind that we need to get serious about security, and
that includes stripping out unwanted hardware and code, including
unwanted Linux kernel drivers.  Getting truly serious IMO includes compiling
a monolithic kernel with exactly the drivers deemed wanted, no
others, and no ability to load modular drivers.  Then, one can lose the
initrd for booting, too, and make the boot process that much simpler
again.  One of the leading principles of security is:  Simplify, omit
things not needed, make sure you thoroughly understand what you keep.

I'm not sure I understand this phrase 'fresh batteries at inconvenient
times', by the way.  I think it might have had some meaning back in the
prior millennium before we all kept a good supply of NiMH cells around,
and a charger or two.  ;->

FWIW, the reason I recently visited the Palo Alto Fry's Electronics, and
noticed that PATA is almost completely gone from the shelves, was to buy
another ten AAA NiMH rechargeables,   Fry's carries Lenmar-brand cells,
which are claimed to be higher capacity (1 amp-hour per AAA) than the
rest, and seem of higher quality than most.

(The more irksome things for me are the label cartridges, which are a bit
spendy, and you always need to make sure you keep a spare handy.)

I forgot to add, earlier:  When I say I 'researched' Dana's spare RAM
sticks and then all of mine, what I mean is I entered the almost
illegibly small model number into a Web search engine, found pages
detailing significant information about the sticks such as which
RAM generation and pin count, and then wrote all of that onto a paper
label that I applied to the RAM stick in question.

The effort is not wasted -- if done on RAM recent enough to be still
useful:  You'll thank yourself later, when scrounging for RAM to beef up
a system and being able to spot compatible RAM quickly without a new
research effort.

The major things you'll want to note down:

o  stick total size, e.g., 2GB
o  old pre-DDR SDRAM vs DDR vs. DDR2 vs. DDR3 vs. DDR4: the broad 'generation'
o  pin count, though this is actually redundant to the prior item
o  speed class within the 'generation':  PC100, PC133, PC-2100, PC3200, 
   PC2-4200, PC2-5300, PC3-10600, etc.
o  maybe the brand (Corsair, Mushkin, Samsung, Micron, Hynix, etc.),
   though this is probably unneeded if you can already see that
   information easily enough

If you're lucky, the RAM stick will already have a paper label giving the
make/model of the stick as a whole.  You enter the model string into a
search engine, and probe what you find.  If you're not, you might have
nothing better to go on than the markings on the individual chips:

Trying to figure out what a stick really is, and what it's good for,
based just on the chip markings, is significantly more difficult.
I would be strongly inclined to junk any RAM stick you really cannot
successfully research, because, realistically, when are you ever
going to use it?