[Wylug-discuss] Wylug Nostalgia (Was: Not wanting to start a distro war)

[Martin Rowe]

I don't have any really old kit, but I have some that has done nearly
twenty years service and is still in use. One is an old 400 MHz machine
that served as a firewall for I think our first ISDN internet connection at
work, back around '99. When we changed providers they didn't want the box
back, so I reused it as a PDF print server & CVS box in 2002. It's still
doing the PDF printing, though due to be retired imminently. One oddity in
dmesg is this line, and was one of the reasons I joined Wylug:

[   32.560204] ibmtr.c: v1.3.57   8/ 7/94 Peter De Schrijver and Mark
Swanson

We were (and still are to a degree) an IBM shop, and the majority of the
network was Token Ring. I never could find much documentation on setting it
up under Linux, but I must have managed it, as this box still runs it.
There is some far flung corner of our factory that has the remnants of the
TR network, connected to some 3rd party kit, and I can run iptraf on the
PDF server if we get issues (though the last time was years back).

The other bit of old kit is at home - a SCSI Epson GT7000 scanner bought in
'97. I was very pleased to find it was well supported by Linux when I moved
off Windows in '99. It's been connected to a series of machines over the
years and is still used regularly (xsane - the same software I started
with). I'm quite surprised, as for at least the last decade it's been
connected to my server in the garage, and the temp in there varies from
0-30C. The drive belts on it are fine, and it scans as well as it did 19
years ago, so I've never bothered upgrading it.

Regards, Martin
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