Talking bios

[Alex Snow]

Yeah I'm going to seriously look into picking one of these up.
On Wed, 
Dec 24, 2003 at 12:51:53PM -0500, Janina Sajka wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 
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