Talking bios

[Janina Sajka]

Yes, mine is a DEC Alphastation AS 200, which means that it was intended
to be a high-end workstation back about ten years ago. It has a 233
megaherz cpu, and about 80 megs of RAM. I wish I had more RAM, but
mostly this does. I have two scsi drives in it with about 53 Gb of total
space on them. I use both the internal NCR scsi chip and a PCI TekRam
scsi controller. The machine also has a floppy and a cd rom drive
(mounted scsi). I boot off the cd rom.

The coolest thing, in a way, is that there's an isa slot where my
internal Doubletalk lives. I have no video on board, because I pulled
the video card that came with this unit in favor of a 3com ethernet card
for a second ethernet port to serve my local lan. Speakup talks nicely
over the Doubletalk using the "dummy video" capibility in Linux. Very
cool.

I have a ups on this system and it reliably restarts if my power goes
down. However, it's not safe to warm restart this system remotely,
because it won't come back. I learned that the hard way. Of course, it
doesn't need restarting except for a new Linux kernel (mostly).

What I have not succeeded activating on this system is the builtin audio
which is also isa. I may try again with a 2.6 kernel. I should add,
though, that I've only tried using the supplied configure scripts for
various alsa deb packages. I have not tried compiling from scratch for
alsa audio.

What this system is doing for me includes:

mail with sendmail -- mostly for myself.
web server with apache for myself and several other domains
dns for a few domains that I host. omc;idomg rednote.net.

When I travel, I log into this box over ssh if I have reasonable speed
wherever I happen to be. I especially like the 'ssh -R' switch for
providing reliable secure access to my traveling portable for anyone
that needs to reach that system while I'm on the road. Works like a
charm and always at the same telnet localhost port. Very cool.

If my net speed is lousy on the road, I do background, encrypted and
authenticated email access. In other words, my portable system runs
sendmail but only sends via an authenticated connection to this alpha
box. This also lets me build up a queue of mail while I'm disconnected
that I can push when next I'm online.





Shaun Oliver writes:
> From: Shaun Oliver <shaun_oliver at optusnet.com.au>
> 
> I had my chance to aquire a dec alpha I tell ya what for 30 bux, I couldn't complain..
> if the opportunity presents itself again, I'll be aquiring one of these babies.