[sf-lug] Rick's explanation of his internet setup.

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Adrien Lamothe (alamozzz at yahoo.com):

> Well, cleaning out dust is always a good thing to do.

True.  I do my best to stop it at the front panel, which has wire grills
over three incredibly noisy 2" high-speed fans.  The whine is loud and
annoying enough that I long ago stopped using my desk, which is right
next to it in the living room.

Anyhow, the few times I've cracked the case, it's seemed to me that
there was very little dust actually _in_ the cavity, because I pretty
frequently remove it from the front-panel grills.

> I think it is an excellent piece of hardware.  The 400BX chipset is
> very stable, a great choice for a server.  The Pentium III Coppermine
> is a very capable processor.

For its day:  very true.  If only the damned thing were quieter and more
power-thrifty.

Before Reg Charney moved out of the Bay Area, he gave me a VA Linux
Systems 2230 2U system, which is based on the slightly newer and fairly
respectable Intel L440GX "Lancewood" motherboard, and has a single
PIII/833 (can support dual).  Reg had disconnected the leads to one of
_that_ box's fans (and tested to make sure it didn't overheat), and
indeed it's way, way quieter than the current model 500 box.

Anyhow, I have in mind to migrate uncle-enzo over to the model 2230
Lancewood system -- either that, or something really quiet, modern, and
small.  Like, imagine:  I go down to Action Computer and buy a nice 2yr.
old laptop with a broken LCD screen for $50.  

That would be, what?  Some P4/1500 or such with a gig of memory, a 40 GB
IDE hard drive.  Built-in UPS (the battery).  Quiet as a dormouse.  Sips
only tiny amounts of power.

And, you know?  There would be no performance difference, because of the
aDSL bottleneck.

> Don't let uncle-enzo die!

I might have him bronzed.  ;->