PERSONAL COMPUTERS

Justin B Rye 1999–2010

This page is where I used to maintain a catalogue of all the machines I've been acting as Systems Administrator for in my spare time; but it makes more sense to centralise that information onto the Xibalba Network page and dedicate this space to an overview of the machines littering my room.

When I became a professional techie in 1999 I obviously had to finally stop hogging the flat's communal server in the kitchen and build myself a workstation of my own – as I'd been saying for years, computers practically come free in cornflakes boxes.  Hurakan has never been bleeding-edge (it has seen a good few crumbly hard drives, fried power supplies, and multimedia-incapable video cards), but it was good enough for me, and it gradually collected upgrades from other people's junk-piles all through the next decade until I celebrated the year MMX by finally getting myself something in-warranty.

Meanwhile I have also always tended to have one or two extra machines under my desk at any given time, either as testbeds for the latest hardware and software or just on standby for the inevitable; and the top of my wardrobe is accumulating an ever-growing stack of junk machines that are technically bootable, but too old to be welcome even as charity giveaways.

It would be really painful trying to do all this with the latest Microsoft operating systems (not to mention being either expensive or illegal), but of course what I'm mostly running is Debian GNU/Linux… and the rare exceptions are the yet-geekier Debian GNU/kFreeBSD!