Accepting Death
OK... so I'm trying to get over the loss of barney and see what's coming up for me. I have several possibilities, but I'm not sure what path I'll be taking.
If money weren't an object, I'd simply get a better, newer sgi box. There are the Octanes which are reasonably priced and could have dual processors with graphics that are just as good. But if money is no object, then the new Fuel or even better yet, the Octane2 workstations are nice.
But money is an object... a scarce one.
So I have to realize that with my domain being DNS-ed at easyDNS I get all the things I really need without having to keep barney alive:
- I can have www.TheManFromSPUD.com hosted on sparky with a redirect to the specific URL. barney used to host this site, but with it moved, there's no need for him.
- I can do all my developing on sherman my iBook as it's got apache, PHP, PostgreSQL on it and that's all the development tools I used on barney.
So in the end, it's not really even necessary to replace barney. But as a collector, I feel a keen sense of loss.
I spent some time yesterday looking at the auctions on eBay looking for what things were going for these days. I was surprised to see that there were as many Octane power supplies on the market as Indigo2 power supplies. This doesn't lead me to believe that they fixed their power problem. Also, let's face it... any reasonable Linux box these days can beat an aging sgi box. I was collecting it for the cache value, not any real need to have it.
So I was checking out other options such as the ultra-reliable SPARC 20. As it turns out you can get one of them for under $200 with dual processors, plenty of memory and lots of stuff. Not bad, but I already have a SS20, and it's fine and loaded with lots of goodies. So I don't really need one, and the collectible value is marginal as I already have one.
I looked at the HP workstations, and I know that I can get all the freeware (gcc, etc.) I need for one of them, but I'm less excited about having an HP box than I used to be. I've certainly thought about getting a nice Linux box, but that's real money (>$2000) and I'm not ready for that yet.
So it looks like I'll take barney off the desktop and put his parts in storage. If it's possible to bring him back later, I'll probably try and do that. But for now, it's time to say goodbye and realize that as a collector of working computers, it's time to move on and close the book on barney.