[Cu-wireless] I found some equipment!

[Ralph E. Johnson]

Brian Foote told me about a place on campus where campus
employees could get surplus equipment for free.  I went over
there today, wondering if I could find a few identical PCs
that would be suitable for routers.  I hit the jackpot!

I found 16 Dell OptiPlex GMT+ 5166.  (Actually, a few were
a slightly different variety of Optiplex 5166).  These are
166 MZ Pentiums with a CD, 32 meg of memory, and ethernet.
All of them have had their hard drive wiped.  Supposedly they
all work, else they would have been junked, not surplussed, but
when we tried to boot one off a floppy, it didn't.  Nevertheless,
I figured that with 16, spare parts wouldn't be a problem, and
took them all.  I took 16 boxes and two monitor/keyboard sets.
I could get more monitors, but didn't want to take anything we
wouldn't need.  The total cost so far is $10 for a parking ticket
plus a couple hours of my time.

Note that the university has these on my account, and it is possible
(though not likely) that someone will ask me where they are.  So, I
will need to keep track of them, and when we throw them away, we
will need to give them back to the university for disposal.  Think
of this as an indefinite loan, not a gift.

I propose to use these as our standard router configuration.  That
way we can make a single boot CD that we can use everywhere.  These
machines would probably be ideal for diskless APs that boot off a
CD because I bet that many of them have non-working disks.  So,
somebody should start figuring out what kind of software should
run on them, make a standard configuration, and figure out how to
make boot CDs out of it.

Anyway, where do I take all this stuff?  I plan on keeping a few
of them for my own work on the project, but I don't really have
room to store 16 machines.  Could I arrange a time tomorrow to
deliver them to whereever we can keep them for a longer time?
Does the Media Center have room to store a dozen of them?

--Ralph Johnson