Ryan's Currently Unnamed Blog

Oh the humanity! Not sure what has happened, but my home comps have taken a turn for the worse. Here's a report of the uptime of my machines at home...

fenchurch   down  11+13:19
ford        down   6+10:47
marvin      down   5+22:34
trillian      up  36+09:06,     0 users,  load 0.00
zaphod        up  13+18:38,     2 users,  load 0.02

First of all.. bonus points to anyone to knows where the names for my machines came from... and super bonus points if they could explain why each name is appropriate.

Fenchurch is an old dell laptop... been on its last legs for a while... and parts of the keyboard stopped responding a while ago intermittantly.. its been taken apart and put back together and taken apart again and is currently in several pieces strewn about... not a pretty sight, and I'm pretty sure its beyond repair...

Ford is a linux workstation... it refuses to even begin to boot up... no clue what's wrong with it.. haven't been able to mess with it lately.. that happened a week ago... (or 6 days, 10 hours, 47 minutes ago.. to be exact)

Marvin is attached to my TV and used to be my TiVo replacement (MythTV in case anyone cares) but since it doesn't do HD, and my crappy comcast DVR can kinda record stuff... sometimes... its been relegated to being a jukebox that plays music... rarely... can probably scrap that project and repurpose it... nothing wrong with that machine.. the power went out and its on a power strip with a really sensative breaker that needs to be manually reset whenever it loses power. Just haven't bothered to reset it.

Zaphod is a dual processor machine that used to get my mail and ran a lot of web stuff, but that's mostly been moved off to my real server on a real connection... it still does some stuff, but that can probably be moved over to trillian...

Trillian is my 'new' firewall/router... the old trillian was a Pentium-166, circa 1996 or so. The hard drive in it had been going for a while.. and it finally crashed.. hard... so... its now an old Pentium II I had laying around... took a weekend to rebuild that machine... but its much better off... old one had 8MB of memory and 2GB of total hard drive space.. but still managed around 400+ days of uptime... its got a ways to go still.

Speaking of uptime.. zaphod used to get up to about 100 days before randomly locking up due to a poor SMP support on the motherboard and linux pushing it a bit too hard. but now its been dying at about 30 days.

Anyway, the point of this is... I have a lot of work ahead of me to figure out what's going on with this stuff... I think that I'm gonna be putting the remains of fenchurch into a newer laptop that's also having some issues... but that's gonna be a project that might take months to finish.. and quite possible could end up being a big waste of time that results in some burned out laptop hardware.. eh.. will see where it goes.