Junking Hardware / Cleaning Office

I'm clearing out about 90% of my old hardware from my home office.

Things like my ancient Sun Sparc Station 4 and 5 for my old Oracle work, and the older Sparc Classic (lunchbox), Sparc IPX systems used in my distributed web development days, and the Cobalt RaQ and iMac G3 systems I did development on about a decade ago.  I'm also dumping a Compaq 286 laptop that served me well in doing assembly and C coding and it's cousin the 486 that was my constant companion for several years. The dumping continues with numerous boxes of old cabling, strange and exotic old cards (ISA, PCI, MCA, EISA, VESA, Sbus, and some I don't even recognize now), a couple of engineering sample video cards, some really old KVMs, couple of 24 port serial port concentrators (that I hacked the firmware on) and even a pair of old Cisco 2500's used in my network testing days. It's about 20 years of hardware exiting the house before we do the renovations and addition to my home.

It is really sad to see some of these little guys leave the house but looking forward to a cleaned out home office that I can get back to being a pleasant work and coding environment.  So out the door they go.

In dumping all this equipment, I've been gathering the hardware junk box that I can re-use in other hardware projects.  So far I have two of these boxes with weird stuff like an old Palm 5 docking station, some ear phones, some older coaxial cable, and the other random assortment of hardware junk you find useful when hacking hardware. These two boxes are starting too look really strange like something from a Mad Max movie.

This is cathartic writing about all these old pieces of equipment that were used in my professional and personal learning processes. It's hard to part with some of these because of the happy memories associated with figuring out the next *big* problem in technology for that time.

Good bye little friends and now to start gathering the next set. :)

UPS and Print Server

I  bought a APC Back-UPS ES 550 awhile back from CostCo without knowing for sure if it would work with the Seagate BlackArmor NAS. It works great so far. I was afraid I would have to hack on the configuration file for the software but it worked out of the box without any extra effort other than enabling the UPS Manager.

I had a second dilemma which was that I use the NAS as my print server for an older Brother MFC 7420 printer and did not want to loose that configuration.  There is only one USB port off the back of the unit that is supposed to work with printers and UPS.  So for my next surprise, I found that it works for both the UPS and printer with an old un-powered notebook USB hub that I got as a door prize at some Cisco event.

I may test plugging up my old 500GB Seagate USB hard disk to that hub as well and see if it recognizes the space and makes it available.

So for anyone else, I cannot vouch for all UPS and printers but my configuration above is working great.