the corner office

I've dragged my old Pentium MMX out of retirement, to use it as a muck-about-and-break test box. It had been running an obscenely old distro like RedHat 7.1 or something, so a fresh install was in order. I'd toyed with the idea of trying Debian or even FreeBSD, but took the least-effort route for now, and plopped Gentoo onto it as well.

Not for the faint-hearted or impatient, though. Probably in excess of 30 hours of compiling, just to get a base system up and running. The cool part of it though was no extra bandwidth needed. I set up my own PC as a local rsync server, and as a cacheing proxy for packages, so that the newly-installed machine relied entirely on my already-updated desktop PC for its syncing and source packages. Two useful articles at the Gentoo wiki to get it set up: HOWTO Local Rsync Server and HOWTO Download Cache for LAN-Http-Replicator. LAN-Http-Replicator is a really nifty utility. It's a simple daemon which acts as a proxy for any wget requests from other Gentoo machines on a LAN. By cacheing all downloaded package files, you never need to hit the Gentoo mirrors more than once per file, and it's a lot easier than exporting NFS shares and the like. It also has some functionality for reducing duplication of files on the host machine, identifying corrupt and redundant packages and so on. Way cool.

I always have a strange sense of nostalgia when I muck about with old machines. I'm revisiting a tired theme, but it still gets me that this old Pentium MMX was once my day-to-day machine, and with a whopping 64 megs of RAM, was more than capable of running all the programs and games I needed. There are obvious benefits to the advance of technology, increased speeds and capacities and functionality, and it's not like anyone would willingly choose to punish themselves with older, slower machines when newer, faster ones are available. Despite that, I can't help but get the feeling sometimes that it's all just a bit wasteful.