Saturday, January 27th, 2018

	On hostnames, my computers in 2017 and change plans
	~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There has  been  quite a buzz all  around the  phlogosphere  about the
three  topics  mentioned in the title of this post, I'm not gonna even
link all  relevant posts, you already read them all. But I have to add
my own bit of  information to all of  them and I'll do it in a  single
post.

Hostnames
~~~~~~~~~
I've been  naming my  computers  after  french  cities in the last two
decades.  There was (or in some  cases  still is) at least one  paris,
toulouse,  marseille,  bordeaux,  calais,  nantes, ineker, nice, caen,
lyon,  troyes,  tours  and I'm  typing  this on  vichy. I  even  can't
remember why I'm  doing this - I  don't  speak  french, I never set my
foot on  french soil, except when I was  boarding ferry to  England in
Calais in  1995 -  but I do it for  years and I'm  just  used to  this
naming scheme.

My computers in 2017 and change plans
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I started 2017 with a HP Elite 7300, a Core i5-based PC under my desk.
It was  there for last two  years,  since I  bought it for a very good
price ($40) in  our  company. I  never  got  used to it  and  did  all
important home/leisure tasks (photo editing, browsing, programming) on
my 2004  PowerMac G5.  Therefor I sold the HP in January and went back
to G5, which I've been using since 2009 as my desktop machine. I don't
mind the slow speed of the  machine as most of stuff I do is slow when
I'm  slow, not the  machine, but in the  second  part of the  year the
machine started to be too noisy for me. It has nine fans, which was no
problem  when it  was new or  just  moderately  old, but in the age of
fifteen they have their service  life almost over.  So in the December
I decided to abandon the G5 for good.

In the area  of laptops, I started the year with HP  EliteBook  6930p,
a 15-inch, Core 2 Duo  equipped  business-class  machine. For my daily
train commuting I had 10-inch  Atom-based laptop. When I stopped using
the G5 on  desktop, I decided to sell both my laptops and replace them
with somewhat newer MacBook and make that MacBook replacement for both
my ancient desktop and not-so-ancient, yet still vintage laptops.

To make this  process  easier, I built a  AMD64-based  fileserver from
scrap parts, put inside it four spare SATA drives (~1.5 TB together in
RAID 5) to collect data from all those computers, sort it and then get
rid of all of them. 

I have  quite a  collection of old  computers and I  think there is no
need to have similar collection of computers for daily use. So, that's
where I'm right now - trying to sell the  laptops,  sorting data on my
fileserver  and  for  all  the  rest  using a  2006  MacBook  from  my
collection.  After I  have  enough  money, I do a  quantum  leap  from
2004  technology  to something  2014+ and hope to live happily another
eight years as I did on my  PowerMac G5.