[Cu-wireless] I found some equipment!

[Sascha Meinrath]

Let's move them to my house for the moment.  Could we do this tomorrow
evening sometime?

--Sascha

On Wed, 17 Apr 2002, Ralph E. Johnson wrote:

> 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
>
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