Progress……
It’s truly amazing how much tinkering time you can have between mammoth data mining queries – I’ve been putting in long hours, but a lot of that stems from waiting around for something to finish. So, from a few posts ago, the list of inactive machines was (with one addition):
- Sun SPARC 20 (bad HD, no mount rails)
- Sun Ultra 60 (bad Graphics? – will not POST)
- HP Kayak (New CPU does not fit – need to mod heatsink)
- SGI Origin 200 (No OS)
- Dell Precision 530 (Bad VRM)
- Dual PIII 1Ghz Fedora Core 4 box (will not POST)
- G4 Cube (Motherboard)
Now the list looks like:
- Sun SPARC 20 RAID Clinic (bad HD, no mount rails)
Sun Ultra 60 (bad Graphics? – will not POST)HP Kayak (New CPU does not fit – need to mod heatsink)- SGI Origin 200 (No OS)
- Dell Precision 530 (Bad VRM)
Dual PIII 1Ghz Fedora Core 4 box (will not POST)- G4 Cube (Motherboard)
Not bad – I found some old PIII procs (400 – 550 Mhz) and was able to swap the heatsinks out on the Kayak to allow the PSU to fit into the case. It already had an OS installed, so once that was done it was running within minutes, sweet! The Ultra 60 (mentioned before) just required the NVRAM zapped and is now happily running Solaris 10. The Dual PIII 1Ghz had developed a case of dead graphics card, I swapped that out and all was well.
Using the other spare PIII’s I’ve also upgraded a few dual PII machines to dual PIII – not a huge difference since the clock speeds are not much higher, but should bump their SETI scores a bit.