Computer Soup

I'm blessed cursed with a house full of computers and equipment. In fact I have so much that if I turn them all on I get a visit from the local electrical inspectors looking for marijuana grow ops.

While I'm usually a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" kind of guy, every now and then I actually have to fix one - and sometimes have to upgrade at least my own workstation - then hand my old down to another task, etc.

This past week has been one of those "hardware" weeks. In fact the past month has been much of a hardware month. Failed hard drives, broken laptop and failing fans have meant nothing but a pain in the butt.

On the other hand sometimes it just feels like trying to make rock soup - only it's computer soup.

With rock soup, so the story goes, the wizened old lady, after coming to the small and poor town on the road to her destination, coerces the town's folk into contributing various items to "help flavor" her soup which she's making with boiled water and a large rock.

Of course the trick is that as each of the peasants adds just a little of their own to the common pot, the soup grows in taste and diversity and all benefit.

So too it is with a computer. You can start with just a case (the rock) and maybe a power supply (the hot water) and each item you add to the soup gives it something that adds to the whole in some way. Add just the right things and you can make a soup, er, computer of just the right consistency. I have my own version of peasants around the house - older systems that are no longer in use but have some potentially good parts if I just can get them into the same soup pot case.

I'm about to do this with Shirley's computer. It used to be my workstation and when I updated to my current AMD Quad-core it seemed fitting to upgrade her older machine by re-purposing my old one. It's a P4 with hyperthreading and 4 Gigs of RAM - and had 8 drives in it when I passed it to her. I've been using it as a backup host as well as her workstation - the backups are done in the early morning so she doesn't even notice.

Over the past 5 years it's suffered a bit and now needs some TLC - so I'm passing her a Core-2 that I've been using as a video capture and background render system for Cinelerra  video editing. It had fan problems (the fans that come with the cases don't seem to last long) and Palimpsest was telling me that one of the drives was failing. Along the way I've updated the Linux to the latest Fedora Core 12 and added a couple of terabyte drives as a RAID 1

Now that she's happy with a dual monitor machine that is far faster than her old one, I need to create some computer soup out of her old one as I have a number of uses for it - but which one is best?

I could simply use it as a network storage system, but the case it is in, while large, is not really very good - in fact it's downright ugly and with its all 80mm fans it is noisy too. Ahhh but I have just the thing - a huge case with power supply currently full of a dead mother board and a bunch of small and old hard drives.

So... to my rock and hot water power supply and case I'll add a pinch of motherboard and a dash of CPU with just a smattering of RAM. To this I'll see if the downstairs workshop can find an extra IDE drive controller or two so I can use some 300 Gig drives I have sitting around - and by the time I'm finished I'll have a box with something close to 3 Terabytes in it and a CPU with enough horsepower and RAM that it too can act as a background render machine for the render farm.

Now I have to make some Compaq chowder - my laptop died. Fortunately Craig's list has found me an almost identical one. Swap a couple of parts and I'll have one really good one and be able to sell the rest for parts to someone else who can make their own soup out of them - and so on, and so on...

Tag: computer