Thursday, May 31st, 2018

	On my fileserver
	~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hello, gopherspace! 
Today I did some Bongusta   maintenance,  added few fresh new  phlogs,
buried the dead, so this may be  a good opportunity to phlog something
myself. 

After I  decided to retire my  PowerMac G5, it was  inevitable to move
somewhere all the  data  from its two disk  drives. As I  mentioned in
January post "On  hostnames, my  computers in 2017 and  change  plans"
[1], I  built for this  matter a  fileserver from some  ancient  spare
parts I found in my   hardware  shelf.  Unfortunately the old hardware
started to fail after three months of daily usage. No surprise - I had
the  board  eight  years and  even back in 2010 I've got it for  free,
because it was  considered so  old,  that the  owner  didn't  have the
courage to want  actual money for it. It served me well, but  hardware
simply isn't immortal. 

However I didn't want to have a G5 and a dead fileserver under my desk
forever, so the  fileserver was  brought back to life in first half of
May. I've got a  socket 775  motherboard,  Intel E5300 CPU and 2 GB of
RAM  almost for free (exchanged for a Lacie FW400 PATA RAID box, which
I've got for  free last  year),  added a SATA and SCSI  controllers in
PCI/PCIe  slots,  coupled  with   the  disk  array  from the  previous
fileserver  incarnation  and a  120GB SSD and the  machine is  back in
operation. 

I did some minor  changes in the process of  resuscitation: NetBSD was
replaced by Slackware Linux, because I  discovered, that software RAID
in the  latter is more than  twice as fast and two  250GB disk  drives
were replaced with a single 500GB one. 

One TB may look as a quite tiny array (3x500 in  RAID5), but as I have
mostly  software and data for ancient  computers there, it's more than
enough. For  example the whole  worldofspectrum.org is about 10 GB and
that is quite  everything made for ZX  Spectrum between 1982 and 2012,
including documentation, pictures, emulators and cross-platform tools.
So  right  now I am  happy  with  the  machine.  Although  I  call  it
a fileserver,  it has  full-featured  desktop  environment  (xfce) and
I use it  to sort the data a bit. My  PM G5  is  therefore  officially
decommissioned and heading for a nice place in my computer collection.
And by the way - after three months of not using it, power consumption
of our household is 20 % lower.