So this morning I tried to revive Defiant at least for a few months to be able to restart working on Catalyst. Unfortunately as I suspected, the CPU fan was dying too, and this means that I’m unlikely to use that box again. Well, I did know the box wasn’t totally sane when I started, because I actually changed it last year, right before joining Gentoo, after another HD died, and the CPU fan started giving strange noises. If I continued using it as my main box, it would have died already now.
This (bad) photo was taken with the new phone, and shows the current Defiant, you can note the missing third slot, that is where the old HDD was (in a removable rack). Of course, it’s likely that this is also the same appearance that the new G/FBSD box will take, most likely.
For small Gentoo/FreeBSD things, I can use Farragut, as I did before, that is the one in the back on the photo, the green ominous led, but if Defiant took one day and a half for building the stages with Catalyst, Farragut would easily take me 3 days.
Now I do have two ways to come out from this mess, the first is to find a secondhand box, 1GHz or more, it’s likely I can find, through my usual local contacts, some 1.2 or 1.4 box, and hope that it will stay in a working state long enough for Gentoo/FreeBSD to be completed; the second is to put away some money in the next months and try to buy the needed components to upgrade my workstation, and use the old pieces for a Gentoo/FreeBSD box.
In the latter case, I’d be reusing the chassis of the current Defiant, and and this starts a problem for me: would the name Defiant stick to the chassis or to the motherboard? 🙂 Most likely the motherboard for me tho, so it would be moving Enterprise as Gentoo/FreeBSD box, and find a new name for the new box.
Anyway, for the moment I’ll be working on other issues than Gentoo/FreeBSD, I have a long enough list to take care of, that I won’t be slacking at all. And I’ll try to coordinate with Javier and Timothy to handle the important stuff.