continuing my pipeline of turning discord rambles into more coherent threads which may turn in to refined blog posts and maybe youtube content someday 🤔
okay i'm lookin' for real hardware to run Citadel-86 on
lets use some of my expansive collection of test equipment to see how much power this Pentium 266 MMX laptop burns at the wall
i managed to spike it to 30W loading a half life level
tuning up power management i got it to idle at ~17W
not bad at all, would not mind burning this to run the board
a quick test 'dialing' out with Telix over my wifi modem confirms hosting Citadel-86 may be feasible
but Cit86 demands carrier detect handshaking which my wimodem does not provide so lets hardwire a custom job
the cable goes to tcpser running on the first gen raspi, and broken telnet implementations continues to be the bane of my existence
...after an upgrade to 128mb of RAM for less swappy half life
Citadel-86 Test System 2 is now reliably hosted on real hardware! 🫡
OR IS IT?
just when i think its stable enough to advertise, one of my login checks from my phone crashes out while i'm at work, rip ☠️
what happen?
it totally cacked itself, database and most of the board wiped out
scandisk takes MANY HOURS to run (not nice) so definitely a HD failure here
but it comes up clean
the federal government murdering my neighbors becomes a bit more of a pressing issue, so the board remains down for a few weeks...
...i've known a few people who liked to crash boards back in the day...
(the ones who didn't OD or end up in jail probably keynoted a defcon or tech conference you've seen)
...so lets pull the drive, get it on a USB adapter on a modern system, get a backup and do a virus scan
Linux kernel throws some IO errors but it doesn't make it to dd, two backup reads are slow and error free, and byte identical
virus scan clean, SMART info shows a mere 13 re-allocated sectors
welp lets zero it a few times and see if it clears up, that forces re-allocation on modern drives
SMART info doesn't change, not much to do but restore the backup and put the drive back in...
...two intensive FIVE HOUR runs of spinrite come up clean, you can definitely hear a section where it madly seeks to reallocated sectors but the total slowdown seems gone
is there a good tool to read the SMART info in Win98 or do i have to find a linux to boot on this thing lol
welp board is back up until it dies again, ssh to [email protected] to connect 🫡
godess bless the eternal travelstar, i have yet to kill one and i'm taking it as a challenge
if this one dies i have a 20gb travelstar that sounds like a jet engine but hasn't lost a byte
GEM is truly truly outrageous