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                               Surreal upgrades

Now the package I put in the trunk is a new harddrive I picked up from
CompUSA [1] yesturday. Tower (the webserver for conman.org) is running a bit
low in disk space so I figured I'd put in a new drive to alleviate the
problem.

Now tower is a 486SX-33MHz NCR IBM PCompatible that was given to me by a
friend (otherwise it would be tossed into the garbage). Not wanting to turn
down an otherwise usable machine I took it, increased the memory to a
whopping 20M and installed Linux on the just barely 200M harddrive.

Yup. I'm serving up the primary web server, [2] an online bible [3] and
friend's site [4] on a machine that most people would otherwise toss into the
garbage. It's adequite enough for what I do with it (and for four years
another friend ran his company, [5] a web hosting company, off a 486 (okay,
so it was twice as fast as my 486, but it worked).

So I went to CompUSA [6] yesturday to find the cheapest harddrive I could
find. I don't need that much space.

The cheapest drive I could find (okay, it wasn't the cheapest, but it was the
best price per gig) was a huge 17G harddrive for $150.

Sure, I could have probably scrounged around for a drive, but it's cheap
enough to get a new one.

But it feels odd installing a 17G drive in a 486. My home system only (only!)
has a 3G drive.

Why not put the 17G in my home system, and move the 3G to the webserver? Too
much hassle. I had quite a bit of fun installing the 17G drive in the 486.
The supplied drive cable wasn't long enough (the two drives sit side by side)
but fortunately my host company [7] provided a “just long enough” cable for
me to use.

Then it was a matter of getting Linux to recognize the second drive. Enabled
it in the BIOS, (Basic Input/Output System) then had to reconfigure some
settings through the BIOS (and here I'm glad the NCR had a BIOS program built
in. The Compaq 486 I have here doesn't) to get Linux to see more than 500M
(the CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide Silicon) had some default values which I
upped using the settings from another Linux system with a 17G drive
installed).

My only concern with such a huge drive is if the machine goes down uncleanly.
My Linux system takes **forever** to fsck a 3G drive, and it's an AMD 586-
166MHz system. Lord only knows how long it'll take a 33MHz 486 to fsck a 17G
harddrive. Shudder.

[1] http://www.compusa.com/
[2] http://www.conman.org/
[3] http://literature.conman.org/bible/
[4] http://www.dharmabum.org/
[5] http://www.armigeron.com/
[6] http://www.compusa.com/
[7] http://www.aibusiness.net/

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