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Recycling Vintage Alphas with Debian
robstah writes: "Vintage Alpha based systems, such as the DECstation are often available going cheap at auctions or free from a skip as companies 'upgrade' to PCs. As many goverments now want to prevent computers from ending up in landfill one solution is for us geeks to recycle. How? Installing Debian of course. Debian Planet has a great article on installing Debian on vintage Alphas."
I've often been intrigued by some of the older Unix workstations, particularly Alphas (for their wide compatibility with PC hardware, of which I have an abudance, and the mystique they carried when they were new). Articles like this insist that people are just throwing these things away, and you can get truckloads of them for nominal cost.
But everything I've seen, on eBay and elsewhere on the net, has been, while maybe inexpensive and even cheap, totally out of proportion to the cost for older PC and even Mac hardware. As the benchmarks in that article show, a 21066 Multia with no cache is barely faster than a 486 at half the clock speed. And yet a loaded multia can still sell for upwards of $200. And the AT-format 21066 board based on the same architecture as the Multia can cost $50 alone (with CPU). I can get a box of 486 or Pentium boards for that much. And of course there is much more abundant binary-packaged software that will run on those.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
Before you can install Debian on an Alpha, you got to first find an Alpha. That's hard to find in Down DownUnder, ie New Zealand (except for my sysadmin, who tends to retire old work machines into his own basement ;-)
I monitored an online auction site (trademe.co.nz) for a while, with no luck. And these old workstations seem to be quite common and quite cheap, say in eBay... I am so jealous.
I want a VMS system! That's what I'd like to get MY hands on an Alpha system for. Either that or I'll have to wait for freeVMS to get off the ground...hooah!
You're using her as bait, Master!
Even then, Slash traffic was heavy. Mod:perl groaned on this host! It was a testament to the DEC folks that it ran with more than a couple hundred connections at all! After all, the Multia was a severely compromised Alpha design, which mated the CPU to a PC-style I/O bus.
Bandwidth consumption forced the removal of Slashdot to real hosting. Was this in '98? Anyhow, shortly thereafter VA donations (pre Andover) moved Slashdot onto dual PII's, and the mighty growth of Slashcode ensued! That's about the time my own Multia started to overheat and require BLOWING INTO THE CASE before rebooting. I put Debian Ham on a K5, and moved my RISC fetish onto early UltraSparc and SGI R10000.
Who else originally found this place because they were looking for WindowMaker .10 -era related sites, and watched Rob's link collection grow?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
A new P4 2Ghz box has a different sort of appeal, compared to a PDP-11/40.
You don't run them because they're low power or because they're fast. It's the appeal of playing with what is now comparitively exotic hardware. You don't *need* to run new software on older machines. It'd be much more satisfying to get the aforementioned PDP-11 connected to the internet then a bright and shiny new computer. Particularly as I don't think there's an IP stack for RT-11.
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
I have a DEC 3000/400 (no "station") that I got virtually for free a couple years back. I ran netbsd (which has much better hardware support on turbochannel machines than alpha linux, plus it's not linux ::ducks::) on it for a long time, it was a web, name, ftp server, you get the picture. 150 or more days uptime, only interrupted by power outages, and it ran in a closet so must have been at least 80 degrees F in there continuously. When I went to move it, I was puzzled at the sticky grey goo underneath the machine until I realized it had melted its plastic feet!
It's a great machine, incredibly reliable, unfortunately the days of these beasts being useful are past I think. It's just so cheap to get an x86 (or in my case an iBook with a dead screen) machine to replace them which is faster, cooler, more energy efficient, and quieter.
Of course the coolness factor of running this old workhorse still appeals to me, perhaps when I get a house with a basement (alleviating the noise and heat) I'll set it up once more.
Warning-plug ahead
I am the adminof ACCRC and I thought a plug for the nonprofit I work at is appropriate here.
ACCRC refurbishes computers and donates them to worthy causes. All donated machines go out the door w/ Suse preinstalled and the retail box taped to the side.
Our charter allows us to accept any Technology as a donation. That which can not be placed w/ a worthy cause is used for cool projects in house.
(ie permanent magnet motors in huge old tape drives are being played with for windmill generator possibilities)
If you want to donate, volunteer, or just say "Hi", check out http://www.accrc.org/
END plug
ok
This place rocks I have alot of fun and get to save the world at the same time. 'nuff said
Cheers,
-chris
admin
slashdot reader
he who fears the 'effect'
There is this wonderful thing that people say when their package doesn't compile on another platform...
"But it works on my Pentium!"
So many apps out there are not 64 bit clean, and they will need to be in the not so far future. A hell of a lot of the Debian package people have been doing a brilliant job to make the packages available compile and work on 64 bit platforms. Bdale Garbee is probably the most well known identity working on this effort and has put a lot of effort into porting to Debian to new architectures.
Not all packages are destined to get ported to every architectures (eg: there is no sound device on an S/390, so no real need to have certain sound packages: But don't forget things like network sound architectures!), but most are, and a lot of it is developers who have no understanding of the issues caused by a 64 bit environment.
"But who cares about Alpha?"
If you think Alpha is the only platform that will benefit from 64 bit clean code, think again! There are a fair number of 64 bit platforms, like ia64 and PA-Risc. Fixing such problems will make such software work on all 64 bit platforms.
One last thing to note is that sometimes it's good to have a different perspective on things occasionly. Not everything revolves around the ia32 (i386, etc) platform like everyone generally seems to think.
I eventually went to NetBSD 1.5 and it booted up and worked fine. It's still alive.
I thought it would be fun, but was a bit dissapointed to discover that it was on the order of a tenth the speed of my Cyrix PR233 machine. I thought an Alpha at 150 could at least keep up with a ~180 MHz X86 processor, but NOOOOOOOO.
Oh, well. It still makes a good Postgresql server.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Actually, no, one of my coworkers did that shot of Penelope in the nude. We had been wearing a little bit of clothing on the set which we had to get rid of.
The big ray-tracing scene was short, as you might expect -- it was tossing the rose from the balcony down to Toninio. We tried rendering the CG rose in RenderMan, and just couldn't get the shadows, bump maps, and translucency to look right. With BMRT it was a piece of cake.
We did all the effects in the movie for a song, just to be able to work on it. Often in the fall, after we've made our numbers for the year, Hammerhead will do an art-house movie like this. Woman on Top was a better movie than people (including Penelope! She never mentions it!) give it credit for. Cruz is simply radiant in the film. Sometimes, movies need just be fun and beautiful.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.