kadatheron

I've had this computer for close to twelve years now. I bought it just before my freshman year of undergrad so I could be "connected" and compute, I guess. The original specs for this Compaq Presario 4504 were a Pentium 1 running at 200Mhz, with 16 MB of RAM and a giant (at the time) 2 GB hard drive. Let's see if I can sort through all the modifications I've made over the years:

• Replaced the original 33kbit WinModem with a full hardware 56k modem that would work in Linux. At the time, Linux could not support software modems, so I needed a new one to connect to the MichNet. This modem supported the internet connection for the (somewhat questionable) LAN we made on 2A Bryan. That LAN was powered by
• The 10Base2/10BaseT ethernet card my undergrad roommate and I bought in a two pack. At the time, MSU had ethernet in only a few dorms. Given the cheapness of thinnet cable, we decided it would be easy to wire our own network by feeding cables through the smoke detector connections and lay the cables over the drop ceilings in the hall. I think we had six or so rooms wired together, with this computer serving as the router and gateway between the LAN and the modem driven internet connection. When I moved to Butterfield, I was able to switch over the the 10BaseT ethernet there. This card died recently, just before my move. This prompted me to buy a proper router, although it still forwards all outside connections to kadatheron for handling.
  
• An additional 32MB RAM module. Installing this was when I first cursed at the design of this computer: in order to get to the motherboard, all ISA and PCI cards need to be removed, the motherboard tray unscrewed, and then removed from the right side of the case. then the memory could be installed, and the process reversed.
• A second 10BaseT ethernet card, that I bought to allow me to continue using it as a router for my subsequent other computer purchases. Most of those are now dead. A summary of the computers this served as a router for:
1. "celephais" An IBM Thinkpad 455C if I remember the model number correctly. 486DX/66 with 12MB of RAM and a 700MB hard drive. My first laptop, and (although I haven't checked in a few years) booted perfectly fine last time I checked. I stopped using it because the odd power supply started to crack and fray, and I didn't want to burn down anything or shock myself on it.
2. "navi", homebuilt computer #1. Dual Celeron 533Mhz/128MB RAM/20GB drive on the sainted Abit BP6 motherboard. Built when kadatheron no longer seemed up to snuff. Suffered from the bad capacitor problem for its entire lifetime, dying finally after about 5 years to a shock while upgrading RAM. Hence:
3. "navi" Mark 2. Pentium 4 2.6Ghz/512MB RAM built with the same drives and case and stuff as the previous version. This seems to have perished in my recent move to Hawaii, so it will likely be replaced with navi, Mark 3 in the not too distant future.
4. "niea" A Toshiba laptop I got my first year of grad school to replace celephais. I don't recall exactly, but I think it was a 1Ghz/256MB/20GB (remember this hard drive for later). It died when I left it in my car during grad student recruitment a few years later, and then booted it up when I got home. Probably wouldn't have been a problem, except for the fact that it was in Michigan, in February, and I think it was somewhere around "ass-freezingly cold" at the time.
5. "tachikoma" A Dell laptop bought to replace "niea." 1Ghz/1GB/40GB? The screen backlight fritzed out, making it largely unusable as a laptop. I continued to use it as a file/process server for close to two years, and I developed a lot of my thesis code on it. I then converted it to play videos on my TV, as it had an Svideo out. I think it still runs, but once I hit post-doc-hood-itude, I replace it with
6. "thebigo" My second IBM (Lenovo, whatever) Thinkpad. An R61 this time, with a Core 2 Duo at 2.1Ghz, 2GB RAM, and 120GB RAM. What I'm using to type this post right now.
• An 8GB hard drive. Files got bigger, and 2GB no longer cut it, even after deleting the half devoted to Windows 95. This died at some point, after making horrible grinding noises.
  
The 20GB 3.5inch hard drive from niea, connected with an adaptor. Once niea died, it didn't seem useful to waste such a big hard drive. By this point, kadatheron was running as the CVS server I used to store most of my home directory. 48MB RAM + 24MB swap no longer cut it, so I devoted 512MB to what was at the time, the largest swap partition I'd ever heard of. I think it's the only thing that's letting the system make it through this upgrade.
• The Plextor CDRW drive I bought long ago when such things were uncommon for niea. It's sat fallow for years since I bought a DVD-RW drive, so it's been switched over for kadatheron for this reinstall.

I think that's it, not counting countless mice and keyboards. I think the fact that it's outlasted five other computers, four generations of processors, six major revisions of the linux kernel (I first installed 2.0.18, and I'm installing 2.6.2X right now), two major libc changes, twelve years, and three presidents suggests that those crack smoking Compaq designers (I mean seriously, the CPU fan blows through a baffle to cool the power supply? WTF?) must have known what they were doing.

I know it probably won't last forever, and it probably uses more power to do its jobs than a new computer would, but I'll be sad when it finally does stop working. I'm not sure anything less than a nuclear war will kill it though. If I count correctly, it made twenty-seven trips between my parents house and MSU, one cross town to my grad school apartment, and now to Hawaii via my movers' Two-Month Special. It would still be running fine if I hadn't tried to upgrade it.

I stopped bothering with upgrades long ago, in 2001 if I'm to believe the timestamp on my kernel. This left me with a 2.2 kernel, which cannot directly upgrade to a modern 2.6 kernel due to differences in libc. Without navi, I had no good way to access my USB drives from the office, so I attempted to upgrade using a fresh partition, chroot, and debootstrap. I'm pretty sure it would have worked correctly had I not screwed up running lilo. As I can reconstruct it, I accidentally had lilo point to the new (incomplete) installation on the disk MBR, and not on the partition. This caused lilo to panic on boot, preventing me from even accessing the old install. Therefore, I needed to make a "fresh" break, and install from CD. It's a bit of a shame, but I'll be able to keep the new system up to date now, so I won't have to worry about falling so far behind again. I will have to redirect things in the new configuration, as the webserver will have to get all my (https and password protected) MP3s from USB drives instead of NFS mounted from navi. When I finally put together the new computer, I'll probably have to design a more sane NFS/drive scheme.

In any case, the nostalgia of doing a reinstall of linux on this computer (which was first installed using a giant stack of floppy disks and the power of Quality Dairy slurpies) made me want to sit down and put together some sort of history for this wonderful little box. It kind of reminds me of R2-D2: it's old and a bit out of date, but it's nearly indestructible and does it's job far better than anyone would have ever expected.