Computer reshuffle

At last, Talia is retired. She did good work for about 20 years, but it's time she was put out to pasture.

Originally, I got her because she was small, and I was trying to cram as many computers as possible into my rack at Energis. She's 2U is height, but half the size of an ordinary rack-mounted computer. She runs a Pentium at 933 mHz, with 512mb of memory, and 20 years ago, that was pretty good.

But her power supply died, and I couldn't get a replacement for any sensible price, because the power supply is a special small one. And I've had to replace her internal fans. So for the last few years, she's been a secondary terminal server, running several terminal windows on Fedora 9 (we're currently on 26, so that tells you how old she is). Because I can't get a power supply inside, I have it hanging off the outside, which is rather ugly. And the power supply also powers four Raspberry Pis, using "Power over Ethernet". I send 12 volts to the Pis, and step that down at the Pi end to the required 5 volts. And she's a bit noisy; the replacement is very quiet.

I've replaced Talia with Talid. Talid has 2gb of memory and a Pentium two-core running at 2.7 ghz. Also Talid is a 64 bit machine, so I've installed Fedora 26 workstation, 64 bit version. I've also brought a spare monitor into play, because I just couldn't get it to work with my usual 1920 by 1200 monitor, it went up to 1024 by 768 (which is pathetic) and wouldn't do any better. So I've got a 1280 by 1024 monitor, which is nice.

To make room for that, I moved the pi that gives me a constant display of network statistics in a graphical form, and its monitor.

I am now surrounded by monitors and computers!