Yes, this is me, sporting the four-digit Slashdot ID. I'm not certain, but that might actually pre-date Google.

For those interested, I did nab a decent motherboard and various other parts to build a proper box, which it's almost time to replace again (although it's far from super-critical). For the record it's now got the aforementioned 120Gb drive, an Athlon Pro1800+ CPU, 768Mb of the appropriate speed RAM, and a 128Mb GeForce FX5200 video AGP card in it. ...and a nice case with a handle built in. The specific motherboard model is the MSI KT4VL http://www.msicomputer.com/product/p_spec.asp?model=KT4VL.

It also has a bajillion partitions on the one drive, which are organized as follows:

1: ~38Gb NTFS, /winxp
17: ~8Gb VFAT, /shared

8: ~512Mb swap partition
16: ~10gb ext3, /home
15: ~1Gb ext3, /tmp
18: ~30gb ext3, /space

(Custom built Linux filesystem)
5: ~192Mb reiserfs, /
9: ~512Mb reiserfs, /var
12: ~8Gb reiserfs, /usr

(Slackware 10.0 filesystem - Legacy & going away)
6: ~192Mb reiserfs, /
10: ~512Mb reiserfs, /var
13: ~8Gb reiserfs, /usr

(Slackware 10.1 filesystem - Primary devel space)
7: ~192Mb reiserfs, /
12: ~512Mb reiserfs, /var
15: ~8Gb reiserfs, /usr

Now, I know that some people might be raising a little eyebrow about having quite so many partitions on one machine, let alone one disk. The point of it is that with this setup, I can keep the same /home (as well as /tmp and /space) directory across all three systems, and merrily do whatever I need to do to any of them, knowing if something goes horribly wrong I can just reboot and get at one of the other two, but that's just a minor thing. The real advantage is that I can maintain multiple sanitized build environments.

Today I finally gave in to peer pressure and the fact that my main devel machine has three hard drives which total a whopping 18Gb of space. I've got multiple OSes and entire multiple builds of Linux on there, so at any given moment I've got about 2Gb total free across all partitions. So I got a new, big drive, to stick on this machine I bought for $65. Celeron 433, LX chipset, PIIX controller.

First fun thing. The new drive is ATA100, which is so snooty as to not talk to my disk controller _at all_ because it's only DMA33. So zip over to the nearby Parts of Questionable Origin store and buy an PCI ATA100 controller. I didn't really recognize it's make at the time, but this is Linux, so I (and this is the kicker) said aloud to myself as I examined it, "Well, it doesn't look like some piece of Korean Abandonware hardware so it should be useable" and bought it.

Second fun thing. It actually IS, rather specifically Koren Abandonware hardware. At one time these little bastards were sold by EpoX as EP-DR02P3 cards, and they've since abandoned them and turned support of them back over to the chipset makers who will remain nameless (although you can look them up not so easily yourself). They last made a binary-only driver that works with kernel 2.4.2-2 and that's it. You even have to DIG through the EpoX FTP site to find it, and then actaully use cpio to extract the module (which, of course, stands no chance at all of working with 2.4.21presomething). I go searching the web to see about further support elsewhere or similar chipsets, and find a message from Alan Cox over a year ago indicating to me that it ain't gonna happen because it works in some horribly freakish way. So I borrow a Promise controller from a friend...

Third fun thing... Waiting for @#$!$ badblocks to finish a read-write test on a @#$!% 120Gb drive.

Screw this. I'm buying a new motherboard tomorrow, and if it doesn't support ATA100, I'm going to behead the salesman with it. If you watch the western sky tomorow you may see my old board streaking into outer space after I kick it out of my house.

I'm sure if I read my horoscope for this week it would have contained stringent warnings about library upgrades.

Let's just say that the jump to OpenSSL 0.9.7 punted me back to runlevel 3 for several hours while everything rebuilt itself.

Fun.

*sigh*

Yessir, there's nothing more fun than upgrading a crypto library you haven't looked at in six months and then logging out, only to watch the machine slowly grind down to runlevel 3 because every bloody piece of the desktop was explicitly linked against libssl.so.0.9.6.

(The above is depressive free prose, this is a journal entry after all.)