I'm Feeling Nostalgic Today!


Last Friday was the long awaited naming and dedication of our building, Scott Rudolph Hall here on the Washington University campus, so now today, with the semester also winding down, I am feeling a bit nostalgic. We actually moved into the building about 8 years ago, and I have also now been working in the department for over 10 years. Wow, the years are really adding up!
Another thing that woke me up was seeing some spam from Buy.com telling me I could buy a 16GB Kingston flash drive for $12.95. I checked our discounted pricing on CDWG, and we can actually purchase a 16GB Kingston flash drive for $9.95. Wow, I remember when I first started in this department in 2002, our then current departmental mail server was a cobbled together Sun Ultra 10 with 256MB of RAM and a total storage capacity of 13GB (one internal drive and three external SCSI drives). So everything on our entire departmental mail/file/web server could now fit on a single $10 flash drive I could carry in my pocket!
A little over a year after I started here we replaced the Ultra 10 with a Sun Fire V250 with a full GB of RAM, and two 36GB disk drives which seemed like all the space we could ever need (nearly 6x the disk storage of that old Ultra 10.) But that trusty, old Sun V250 was just retired earlier this year with a Dell PowerEdge T310 with two 2TB drives, 8GB of RAM and a quad core Xeon processor running Ubuntu Linux 10.04 (much preferred over the rather ancient Solaris 8 running on the Sun). The Sun Fire V250 still runs just fine actually and typically had a load average near zero while processing all of our e-mail, file and web traffic. The new Dell PowerEdge does not even break a sweat doing the same tasks. It seems a shame not to have a good use for that old V250 since it is built like a tank and would probably keep running forever.
The old Sun sure is a lot prettier than the new Dell tower server too. The T310 sits next to a similarly boring looking black T410, but there is also an older, but much shinier and prettier PowerEdge T300 next to them as well. I do not understand why Dell decided to make their new tower servers more boring looking than the the older ones. Sure they may just sit in a server room, moving around files and e-mail messages, but since they styled the T300 to look pretty nice, why did they make the T310/T410 so dull?


Another funny, geeky anecdote for today: I received a frantic message from a faculty member saying he could not telnet into his DEC Alphastation. First, I had to make sure it was not 1995 any more, and then I went ahead and visited him. Sure enough, his old DEC Alphastation was still alive running OpenVMS Alpha Version 7.1 but it was on our network. This was the perfect task for my "nostalgic Monday". I looked at the back of his system and tried reconnecting the RJ45 Ethernet connection and then it came back up. It seems he must have bumped the cable there when he was neatening up his lab for the building dedication on Friday. See how this goes back to my original subject of my posting too? Pretty neat, huh?




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