{"id":2479,"date":"2017-06-07T16:24:49","date_gmt":"2017-06-07T20:24:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.timeoff.org\/rick\/?p=2479"},"modified":"2021-09-28T10:01:22","modified_gmt":"2021-09-28T14:01:22","slug":"hydra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.timeoff.org\/rick\/2017\/06\/07\/hydra\/","title":{"rendered":"Hydra"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is a story about Hydra. Hydra’s a box<\/em>, a computer, that up and died the death that old machines sometimes do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hydra, dead, stripped of all innards save the CPU and motherboard, awaiting transport to the parts shelf. Click for full-size image in a new tab.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I’m not 100% certain why<\/em>\u00a0Hydra’s dead, but pulling everything except the CPU still won’t elicit so much as a measly POST beep from\u00a0the aged motherboard. I meter-tested the power supply. (I had\u00a0another box on the bench for a PSU replacement, so I briefly stuffed the\u00a0new PSU into Hydra just to make sure.) There’s nothing left to die except\u00a0the mobo or CPU!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“So what,” I hear you thinkin’, “who TF cares about yer old box?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, I do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

See, Hydra’s served the house in various capacities for a long, long time before retiring to the un-insulated sun room by the pool deck – most definitely an unfriendly environment for computers. The moisture, for one: Florida’s humid. The there are the temperature swings; in winter it can drop to near freezing and closed up in the summer it might reach 115F\u00a0– or more. Environmental extremes have been the story of Hydra’s life. Finally, Hydra’s kinda remarkable in that it’s one of\u00a0the oldest processors that Windows 10 will run on: the\u00a0AMD Athlon 64 3200+.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So yeah, it’s worth taking a few minutes to write\u00a0about little Hydra’s uncomfortable life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Dex (left) & Reptar, circa 2002, about four years before Hydra.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

For that we have to go back to Monday, October 16, 2006. That’s the day I walked into a local Comp-USA<\/a>\u00a0(remember that name?) with the idea of upgrading the house servers. At that<\/em> time there were two. A more-than-10-year-old\u00c2\u00a0Pentium Pro box named Dex running Win2K Server, and a slightly newer Pentium II\u00c2\u00a0box named Reptar\u00a0doing file server duty. Dex and Reptar were\u00a0simply\u00a0running out of gas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wanted a 64-bit CPU, a couple of GB of RAM with room for some future expansion. Remember, memory\u00a0was considerably\u00a0more expensive than\u00a0it is today. I wanted\u00a0the ability to use my existing IDE drives plus some SATA ports for later. I wanted a PCI bus. Overall, just something a bit more modern, something that would run VMware so I could segment the family’s workload.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I walked out with basically this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n