Or 11 years moving packets back and forth.

These are the remains of ‘Cachafaz’. It’s a very special computer for me. We bought it in 1999, it was my third computer, the second I’d put Linux into. Back then i called it ‘Garchake’ because I was using Mandrake. Lots of memories spring back… my first steps in C, hacking xmms plugins, countless hours playing Unreal Tournament (with windows ME, ewww). Amoung our friends it was pretty beefy, amd k6-3 400Mhz, 512Mb, 10gb hd plus the 2gb disk from my older computer, 56k modem and a Voodoo 4500…

It was our ‘internet machine’ too, I left a very clean account with gnome and the essentials (dialing, mail, chat…). Then I bought a better machine and this was relegated as a router and downloads box. I hid it behind some furniture and just left a couple of buttons outside to dial and hang up (still on dial-up, we are on 2005 now). At night a cron job started some p2p programs and also downloaded every url from a list.

Then we (finally) managed to get adsl (512/64 and after 1M/512k. With luck). That explains the white modem loose inside.

Somewhere in 2008 one of the memory modules started to fail (segfaults every time the memory consumption increased) and because of that it was no more possible to run all the p2p programs it used to.

By now it is hooked to a wifi router+switch combo. The original idea was to replace it with the router but it refused to talk to the adsl modem. Given that it has 1M of flash slapping an alternate linux based firmware is very hard if not impossible.

Also, power outages started to become the norm and waiting for it to fsck and boot were really annoying. So i replaced init with a simple shell script to setup the routing tables, sshd and pppd with all the partitions mounted read-only. From power up to a working link in 34 seconds. Take that Ubuntu. To be fair, no desktop, no nothing. Just some open shells in case i decided to put again the videocard and a monitor. At this point it had no fans, the only thing that still made noise was the disk.

Fast forward to mid January 2011. The disk now makes from time to time a rattling noise. I fire up ssh, it takes an awful long time to give a working shell. Working… the disk is fried. Every command barfed with “input/output error”. Sweet. But pppd still worked. So as long as it has power all was fine.

Not wanting to loose connectivity in the most inappropriate moment I replaced it with another device that fits in my palm, has more computing power (and it’s mips instead of x86) and also runs Linux. But that’s a story for another day.

Some people have dust bunnies. I have an entire zoo. Pics or it didn’t happen: