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Free Multias (Pay Shipping Only)
Richard Fifarek noticed an odd little note on the Linux Store's website. Apparently they are giving away Free Multias. Just pay shipping ($30) for a free Multia.
link is giving away Multias. My multia ran Slashdot for the
first few million pages. Nice little machines. Very cute. Ran
Linux quite nicely.The folks over there said that you guys have managed to crash their e-mail/web AND phone system. So-let 'em catch up. A phone system. Heh.
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I bought one of these a few months back...
For memory, you will need true parity, this is more expensive, but definately obtainable.
A disk is a bit trickier. Multia's can take internal IDE or SCSI2 lap-top disks without any problem. There does seem to be enough room to fit a regular 3.5 inch disk inside, and you can rig the external scsi2 cable to go internal instead, but I wasn't able to draw sufficient power from the internal lap-top ide connector to power a 3.5 inch scsi disk, thus you're better off going with an external scsi2 if you don't want to get a lap-top disk.
Also make sure it has, or you can get, a floppy. Getting it to boot without one is very difficult.
Otherwise, these make nice machines, don't expect anything in the way of speed, but they serve well as rock solid light servers.
Good luck.
First, a lot of these boxes have very tired cmos batteries. They won't boot if the battery voltage is too low. They use a standard 4.5 volt battery, and in my case i ended up taping together three AAA batteries.
Second, these do indeed run hot. I had one running at about head-level on top of some other equipment. The experience was not unlike blowdrying my hair. But there are some things you can do to improve the situation.
Most importantly, run these in vertical configuration, processor end up. This is the side with more holes drilled in the casing. These all came from the factory with a metal bracket to hold them upright, but some are now missing them. Mine is missing that bracket.
Also, you may notice there's two wires leading out from the fan clipped to the side of the power supply with a little dark thing about the size of a match head attached. This is a temperature sensor, and in many cases these are no longer effective. If you clip those wires, the fan will spin at it's top speed instead of relying on a temperature reading from the sensor. This, in addition to running the system in the vertical position, often overcomes overheating problems.
You can put just about any PCI video card that will fit in these, if you have the right riser card for the job. But the xfree86 ports to linux/alpha don't support nearly as many cards as the intel version. The Matrox mil2 is very popular in these. I have a #9 motion 771 in mine. s3 vision 968. It barely fits.
If you want a little more oomph in an alpha, computersurplusoutlet.com in vegas is selling 266mhz alpha-pci motherboards for $150, including the processor. These, like the multia, are a 21064 processor, and none too fast, but they are a bit snappier. They need +3.3v supplied from the power supply in addition to the usual voltages - it would be possible to modify a cheap ATX power supply to supply the regular AT voltages and the additional 3.3v, and thus avoid buying the hugely expensive power supply ComputerSurplusOutlet tries to pawn off with it.
standard disclaimers apply, I don't work for anyone, blah blah blah. (well, i have a job, but, you know.)
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
First of all, I remember the big deal with all of the Multias a while ago (januaryish?) and apparenty some people got them to work and others turned them into paperweights. I noticed that they were selling tech support for $25 an hour...which is cheap as tech support goes, but you will probably need it.
Anyway, here is the thing that really bugs me. The Linux Store is selling linux boxes as its main product apparently. Makes me wonder why I get this:
[~]>telnet www.thelinuxstore.com 80
Trying 216.160.206.18...
Connected to www.thelinuxstore.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/4.0
Content-Location: http://216.160.206.18/index.htm
Date: Mon, 02 Aug 1999 04:39:22 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Sat, 05 Jun 1999 23:39:08 GMT
ETag: "076d79aacafbe1:51c2"
Content-Length: 1476
Hmm...I would be skeptical about their commitment to be honest. As a business, I wouldn't buy from someone who didn't run the product they sell, makes me question the quality of the product. Like when Microsoft didn't upgrade to IIS 3.0 on www.microsoft.com until 6 months after it came out.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
The motherboard does have VGA video out, PS2 keyboard and mouse in, one parallel port, two serial ports, and two PCMCIA slots. There's an IDE connector for a 2.5 inch IDE drive. There's (barely) room for the 2.5 inch hard drive and a laptop (slim) floppy drive. Some models can accept a 3.5 inch hard drive, but then you lose the potential for PCI expansion. There is *no* room inside for an internal CD-ROM or any other drives. Also, the power supply isn't designed to power more disk drives. Don't even think about putting a 7200 RPM or 10000 RPM drive inside.
If you're lucky, the machine *might* come with a riser card that has a SCSI interface and a slot for a single PCI card.
If you're *really* lucky, the riser might even have an external SCSI cable.
Executive Summary:
This is a good deal if you're familiar with Multias and don't mind scrounging the other needed pieces. But if you think it's a complete computer, forget it. Also, if you think it's some screaming fast Alpha, guess again.
Eric (owner of two 233 MHz VX42 Multias)
The Multia also has built-in 10 Mbps Ethernet, with 10-base-T (twisted pair), 10-base-2 (thin coax), and AUI connectors.
Some Multia owners have experience reliability problems which can be solved by replacing a chip and/or the fan. Details are in the Net/BSD alpha Multia Frequently Asked Questions.
Since I used to use my Multias pretty heavily as web/mail/etc. servers, I collected a bunch of info about them here, including the service manual in PDF form.
Oh yeah, and if you don't think that $30 is a good deal for one of these, bear in mind that I paid an average of $1250 for mine. :-)
yeah, queso
:)
Oh wait that's for finding out what someone ELSE is running
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I'm typing this from a Multia, so I suppose I know enough about them to get them running. You'll need:
:)
* True parity SIMMs (in pairs). In other words, not EDO. These SIMMs come at a premium price today, though you can usually pick up some on Ebay cheaply.
* Floppy drive - this is (I think) a standard laptop floppy. You'll likely want to have one available for the install.
* Hard drive. My Multia uses an internal 3.5" SCSI drive. They can use 2.5" SCSI drives or 2.5" IDE drives as well, though I've heard you have to update the firmware to get the IDE working.
* Keyboard/mouse - Normal PS/2 stuff.
* Video - 256 colors, pretty much any res/refresh rate you want Normal VGA connector.
* Network - AUI, 10bT, 10b2. Pick one.
* Serial - semi-standard. You should be able to hook a modem up with a normal 25-pin cable. There's a funky cable available that can split up the port into two ports.
* Parallel - standard.
What you can put inside depends on what riser card you get. One allows for an internal 3.5" drive. The other allows only a 2.5" drive, but also provides on PCI slot.
-- Rick
I mentioned this last time Multia's showed up on Slashdot, and figured it was worth mentioning again. I have a couple of them. At $30 bare, they're not necessarily a good deal. They take true-parity RAM. Its not that easy to find, most parity RAM today is not true-parity. Trust me, they won't work without it. I've tried.
Obviously you can't do much without the floppy drive. Figure $30 to get one from a place like Starship Computers. Most Multia's I've seen recently being sold do not have an external SCSI port, so you'll have to figure out a way to jam a harddrive in the case. Don't put anything too expensive, Multia's are space heaters, it won't last very long. You might be able to put a IDE notebook drive, but you'll need to find a cable that works with the smaller IDE connector.
Have I mentioned that they're SLOW? A 166 mhz Multia is a LOT slower than a 166 Pentium. *MUCH* slower. Can't say that too many times. *MUCH* *MUCH* slower. Most of the 166's were not socketed, so you can't even upgrade them to the older 233 processor (which again some places like Starship Computers sometimes are selling on onsale.com)
They're interesting to have to be able to play with an Alpha, and you'll have the honor of telling people you've got the slowest Alpha on the block! FIgure on spending another $300 or so to get anything useful out of it, and useful is a relative term. I run secondary DNS and DHCP on one. I ran a print server for a while using Ghostscript, but it took the poor guy five minutes to rasterize a page.
I figured I should mention, that MOST of the surplus Multia's I've seen in the last six months or so DO NOT have the external SCSI port. Most of the ones DEC made didn't have them.
The sound hardware in the Multia is *noisy*. And its just barely fast enough for MP3 playback.
Don't waste the money on one of these for that. You can buy a new Pentium barebones system that'll work better, and run cooler and more reliably for less money. Even if you get no drive, you should figure on spending $100 more on RAM and a floppy drive for one of these.
Just like not all multia's have the extrenal SCSI port, not all Multia's have the full meg of flash RAM, and as such only have SRM or ARC, not both. You're pretty much hosed in that case. Some DEC systems can boot Linux from SRM, but I never got it working on my Multia's. Both AlphaStations I've got DO boot from SRM though.
You might want to check if you actually even have ARC, and if not, you may be able to flash the linux kernel into the flashram if its small enough. I've heard of it happening, but YMMV and you could probably turn it into a doorstop if it doesn't work.