Just before the weekend, I dug out an old machine I hadn’t used in a while, my old fileserver columbia, since replaced by the second incarnation of intrepid — you can find out more about my random collections of tech if you so desire. So after plugging it all in and realising I didn’t have any thin ethernet cable lying about to plug into it — yes, thin! — I finally downloaded the D-Link driver disk with the DOS setup program to switch from the BNC connector to the RJ45 connector. That done, I rebooted, and lo it was on my network again for the first time in just over two years :)

So I decided to login …

intrepid:~> telnet columbia
Trying ???.???.???.???...
Connected to columbia.local.zensoft.net.
Escape character is '^]'.

columbia login: neuro
Password:
Last login: Sun Aug 19 00:43:45 from intrepid.local.z
Linux 2.0.27.
You have new mail.
columbia:~>

… yes, a Linux 2.0.27 kernel, sitting on a Slackware 3.3 install IIRC, and that last login was August 19th, 2001! What meagre specifications it has — doing a side-by-side comparison of columbia versus intrepid looks terrible: 486SX25 versus PIII 600; 4 meg of RAM versus 256 meg; 2 gig of disk across 3 disks versus 185 gig of disk across 5 disks (plus more over NFS); 10 megabit D-Link ISA NIC versus 10/100 megabit 3Com PCI NIC; 2.0.27 kernel versus 2.4.21 kernel; and so on …

But bless it’s ickle cotton keyboard connector, it’s still my first ever file server, and I’m awfully attached to it ;)