Thou hadst, and more, Miranda.

I finally have the file/web server of my dreams!

Okay, it’s not quite what I would ideally want, but it’s getting quite close.

The problem was that the old Compaq machine was dying. Well, dead would be more like it. I had already brought in a 300 MHz PII machine to replace it, but that box was having lots of problems. Particularly, it would run out of virtual memory every time I tried to do anything. So, with the death of one machine, cannibalization became possible. I stole 192 MB of RAM from the dead machine, which made the server run a lot faster.

I then took the 80 GB drive from the old machine and tried to put it in the new machine. The motherboard didn’t like it. This new machine (which technically is older, but isn’t crippled by Compaq’s motherboard and proprietary BIOS) has an older motherboard that doesn’t want to read larger hard drives. This is in keeping with what I deduce the design philosophy was, which is “just barely enough”. Fortunately, Jake had some advice. He suggested using an ATA controller card. So, I stole one out of my main system (losing the Zip drive as a result, but I’m not losing any sleep over that), and now the 80 GB drive is up and running.

I also swapped the machine’s 32x CD ROM drive for a 32x10x40 CD-RW drive. I should take some time to image the system’s OS drive soon.