My friends know that I’ve been a geek for some time. So much so, in fact, that I made a somewhat decent career out of it. But I’d like to go back for a moment to the year 2000.  At the time, I was the “new kid” in the IP Engineering group. I studied and got my MCSE, my CCNA and my mentor, Malcolm, taught me the basics in UNIX. I learned how the web worked, and set up my first server at home.
Fast forward to a year ago. I was hosting 79 domains, dedicated Celeron 533 for DNS and my personal e-mail, a PIII500 for hosted mail (RedHat 9), PII350 for Apache (RedHat 7.3), a file server (PIII600 win2k), a firewall on a PII350, a desktop and a lot of heat. Being that I think VMware is the greatest thing since sliced bread (and I teach the stuff professionally,) it was time to put my money where my mouth was. I bought an HP XW6200 on eBay for about $400 and built out an ESX server. Granted, these workstations are not on the VMware HCL for ESX for a number of reasons (the least of which is lack of redundancy and it has SATA controllers), but after a few BIOS tweaks, it’s rock solid. For the money, you can’t beat it. There are a lot of them coming off lease right now so it’s time to pounce if you want one.
Moving forward to this post, I’ve virtualized the entire shebang. No redundancy, but hey, it’s not like there was any before! So now I’ve decommissioned all these old machines and am getting rid of them (as well as the spare parts I was keeping on hand).  I mean, it’s not like this equipment can run Vista (or for that matter, OSX or Ubuntu.)
Inwin Case. When it ran RedHat 6.2 with no GUI, it was a Celeron 533 with 128MB RAM and two 3com NICs. For its new life as WinXP, the CPU was changed to a PIII 500, 512MB RAM, a single Netgear NIC, a sound card and an ATI Rage AGP adapter.
This is what prompted me to write this post. I just built my old faithful RedHat 6.2 server with over 3600 days of service into a WindozeXP machine that I’m passing forward to a friend (There was extensive vacuuming btw.) . It’s not fast, but it’s got VLC, Open Office, Firefox and AVG. Hopefully it will help some young kids get their feet wet. It’s a bittersweet farewell to that old beast.
