[Pentium]

I got fed up with low octane/ethanol knock so I hunted down and bought what is basically a Knock sensor in a box. Wires into almost any carbureted engine and auto-retards spark timing when you knock instead of just pulling your timing waaaay back all the time and accelerating like a slug all the time.

[defaultrouteuk]

Nerds,

The cut runs deep with what M$ did to CP/M, Novell and Netscape, lest we forget. Anyway, history is written by the victor, so Bill Gates wrote DOS, invented Active Directory and definitely pioneered the www ok!

For the true pioneers...

   

[jan-jaap]

More infrastructure upgrades:



NUC8i5, quad core + HT, 64GB RAM, 1TB NVME storage. I chose the NUC8 rather than the NUC10 because the NUC8 i5 is faster then then NUC10 i5 and the i7 models are expensive. It runs ESXi 7.0.

This will replace a steadily growing zoo of small appliances: piHole, smart home, Ubiquity controller and other related internal stuff. Virtualization gives me more flexibility to experiment and upgrade safely.

I may eventually virtualize my pfSense router and internet facing WWW/FTP sites which currently run from dedicated appliances.

[GeekLucanis]

My most recent purchase was the Indigo/Onyx drakware adapter. I'll need to fabricate a cable for minidin6 to db15, but it should be doable.

[weblacky]

More infrastructure upgrades:



NUC8i5, quad core + HT, 64GB RAM, 1TB NVME storage. I chose the NUC8 rather than the NUC10 because the NUC8 i5 is faster then then NUC10 i5 and the i7 models are expensive. It runs ESXi 7.0.

This will replace a steadily growing zoo of small appliances: piHole, smart home, Ubiquity controller and other related internal stuff. Virtualization gives me more flexibility to experiment and upgrade safely.

I may eventually virtualize my pfSense router and internet facing WWW/FTP sites which currently run from dedicated appliances.

I'd be interested to know how that goes.  I did look into the eval free ESXi 6.5 a while ago...I didn't know NUCs were workable.  Do you have a whole site license or are you just using the free edition?  Please let us know if this goes smoothly or if you found any tips/tricks to get it working.

[Raion]

Fire Emblem for Gameboy Advance!

[weblacky]

Well the special day has come and while I don’t have everything that I need to create automated test harnesses.  I have the brain; the magical item I’ve hinted at a few times that I’d hopefully be able to buy in December.  Well, I called my contact and he said the employee who thought he knew how to use it (but didn’t…so the business thinks it was as waste of money) doesn’t work there anymore…no one there understands how to use it (too complicated for them, I guess) so they are ready to sell now.

I reconnected with my contact, drove 400 miles round-trip today to the location and purchased…a HUNTRON TRACKER 3200S.


https://huntron.com/products/tracker3200s.htm (Images attached are from the product website, copyrights belong to Huntron.com)

          

That’s right…I’ll give you a moment to let that sink in.


OK in all seriousness, this item is like a logical X-Ray machine for electronics, it’s “the” black box PCB fault finding instrument.  With this I can finally troubleshoot my Tezro 1.8v failure and troubleshoot the stack of PSUs to rebuild I’ve been collecting.  Now, I don’t have rights to the PC software to perform automated PCB board scans and recall/compares right now.  But I hope to have that figured out a couple months from now ($$$).  For now the main unit works fine and I can use it manually.

While I need to refocus on actual work efforts in the short term.  I’m hopeful in a month or two to be able to start cranking through my SGI troubleshooting backlog and when that dam breaks, rebuilt stuff will start to pop-up for sale here on IrixNet!

There is a hope that if this all starts, I’ll start using it for repair services in the future for SGI board repairs.  The tracker works best if you have a working example PCB to compare the bad PCB to, so one-offs will be more scan and guess.

[jan-jaap]

I'd be interested to know how that goes.  I did look into the eval free ESXi 6.5 a while ago...I didn't know NUCs were workable.  Do you have a whole site license or are you just using the free edition?  Please let us know if this goes smoothly or if you found any tips/tricks to get it working.

ESXi works out of the box on the NUC series. They seem to be quite popular for homelabs because of their size and low power consumption. You can find a ton of information on sites like virten.net and virtuallyghetto.com.

There are a few things to keep in mind:

• Most NUCs have only a single ethernet interface. If you want to virtualize a router you'll want at least one more. Easiest and cheapest is probably a USB3 ethernet dongle but that's not officially supported and requires some hacking in boot scripts. Another option is to use thunderbolt and the Apple TB-to-ethernet dongle. If you want to go fancy you can get a TB-to-10Gbe adapter but it'll use as much power as the entire NUC.
  
  
• Official memory limit for most NUCs is 32GB but they take at least some 64GB kits just fine.
  
  
• You will have to do without ECC RAM, Xeon CPUs, remote management, console redirection, redundant storage and PSUs, but you don't get those in your average home router either. Your wife will love you for not mounting a Proliant DL380 in the utility cabinet ;-)
  

In my case the lack of the 2nd ethernet interface was the biggest downside, but I couldn't find anything with (1) a proper, non-Atom CPU, (2) non-realtek ethernet, and (3) documented ESX support. The NUCs are popular for a reason. I will probably go with the Apple TB ethernet dongle. I chose an SSD with power-loss protection to hopefully avoid corruption in case of unexpected power cuts.

The lack of hardware redundancy means potential downtime in case of failure, but hey, it's a home network. The use of ESX also means hardware abstraction -- if this things fails in a couple years I'll just buy another VM host and rebuild it on that. Right now the server which hosts techpubs.jurassic.nl (and a few more) is an aging Jetway Atom, and if that fails I have much bigger problems.

I use the free ESXi license so I basically manage the ESX side of things through the builtin Web interface. I have some other VMware software (Fusion/Workstation/Remote Console) to get to the console of the VMs if I have to. I don't have access to a site license / I'm not willing to fork over a couple of thousand to VMware, otherwise I guess you could build a HA cluster with three NUCs and do failover and load balancing. But no. The aim here was a bit of flexibility and hardware consolidation, not sysadmin masturbation.

---

OK in all seriousness, this item is like a logical X-Ray machine for electronics, it’s “the” black box PCB fault finding instrument.

That is pretty interesting. I'm looking forward to your adventures with that.

[Pentium]

Apricot Xen. British 286 from the mid 80's.



I've been chasing one of these machines for...25 years? I've pretty much given up finding one locally so I ended up paying $120 + $300 (!!!!) shipping to bring one in from the UK. It was indeed very, very expensive but it's complete (aside form docs and disks), no battery damage and very clean.

[jpstewart]

That's an interesting looking system and in beautiful cosmetic condition.  Congratulations.

Is that an LCD on the keyboard?  How was it used?  (It looks like the forerunner of the Logitech G15 etc. keyboards that had LCDs on them.)