shaving a yak
Mar. 2nd, 2008 03:10 pmI decided that today, I would experiment with taking one of the six or seven old PCs lying in the kitchen and putting FreeNAS on it - so we can centralize a lot of our large files.
But before I could do this, I needed a power cable for it. Where were the cables from these machines? In the "borg cube", a milk crate full of an absolute rat king of cables and old mice and speakers and crap. You couldn't get just one; it was impossible. To make things worse, the crate was stuck in a dimly-lit closet.
So Rik and I ended up dumping the whole thing out in the living room (good thing Nick had turned the heat on earlier for assorted chores) and untangling everything, including the 80 or so feet of old Ethernet cable. Some things we threw away; one cable we just cut and tossed.
We don't want to think about why there was an electric toothbrush at the bottom of it all.
Everything is now neatly wrapped up in loops or figure-eights, firmly secured (we hope) by a bunch of twist-ties. Hopefully it will remain something you can actually dig into and get things out of.
At the point where Rik had to go out to the store to acquire more twist ties to help loop up the cables for re-storage, I realized we were definitely yak-shaving. But hell, this is a yak that's needed shaving for several years now...
[ later: And of the old PCs that could be plugged into our monitors and would power up... none would run FreeNAS; they both crapped out at the same point in the boot process. Drat! Well, let's see if Openfiler will work on these crusty Dells. At least we got those damn cables unsnarled for once and for all. ]
But before I could do this, I needed a power cable for it. Where were the cables from these machines? In the "borg cube", a milk crate full of an absolute rat king of cables and old mice and speakers and crap. You couldn't get just one; it was impossible. To make things worse, the crate was stuck in a dimly-lit closet.
So Rik and I ended up dumping the whole thing out in the living room (good thing Nick had turned the heat on earlier for assorted chores) and untangling everything, including the 80 or so feet of old Ethernet cable. Some things we threw away; one cable we just cut and tossed.
We don't want to think about why there was an electric toothbrush at the bottom of it all.
Everything is now neatly wrapped up in loops or figure-eights, firmly secured (we hope) by a bunch of twist-ties. Hopefully it will remain something you can actually dig into and get things out of.
At the point where Rik had to go out to the store to acquire more twist ties to help loop up the cables for re-storage, I realized we were definitely yak-shaving. But hell, this is a yak that's needed shaving for several years now...
[ later: And of the old PCs that could be plugged into our monitors and would power up... none would run FreeNAS; they both crapped out at the same point in the boot process. Drat! Well, let's see if Openfiler will work on these crusty Dells. At least we got those damn cables unsnarled for once and for all. ]