My machines

1990-1991 (approx.) – i386

At the Beginning, there was a Compaq 386DX/25 named Keltia. It was running MS-DOS 3.31 as it was the only version with support for more than 32 MB per partition… I don’t recall the exact configuration though, probably 1-4 MB of RAM but I did experiment with extra RAM card in EMM mode (you know, the mode in which you used to have a 64 KB “window” into 2 or 4 MB – if you’re too old to have seen such hacks, please ignore the old fart in me).

It was also the machine I run my first experiments with UNIX on a PC: SCO Xenix SVR2, SCO UNIX SVR3.2, Microport SVR4. Found out I had a bad memory chip because Microport used to panic rather often.

1992-1994 (approx.) – i486

First major upgrade, a 486DX-33 with 16 MB of RAM, paradise. It ran 386BSD 0.1 then 0.2 up to FreeBSD 1.x if I recall correctly. It was later upgraded to 20 MB (which helped a lot for kernel builds) then the CPU got replaced by a 486DX4/100 and more memory.

1995-2001(approx.) – Pentium era

Some friends and I went to the computer shop we always bought hardware from and ended up with a nice ASUS motherboard T2P4 and a P133 CPU (from memory). Had a lot of fun with it and was able to do more FreeBSD work. Used to run FreeBSD-CURRENT. Nice machine. It was later upgraded with a K6/200 CPU which gave it a new life. 4 hard disks in the machine, 2x 1 GB ones and 2x 4 GB (yes, I know USB memory sticks are now more or less bigger).

2002-2006

Difficult era where keltia had some hardware problems and got “upgraded” several time with machines from various origins. The last one was a PII/350 bought from the late company France Teaser. Hard disk capacity went up to 17 GB in two disks but IDE ones. This was the end of the pure SCSI era for keltia…

May 2006 – big upgrade D820: dual core 2.8 GHz pentium

Tired of working with machines pieced together, I buy a brand new machine from Dell with 3-year warranty on-site. 512 MB RAM, 2x 160 GB SATA hard disks (mirrored of course), a dual core CPU running at 2.8 GHz. What a upgrade! Nice, fast and quiet. I like it.

November 2007 – FreeBSD/amd64 7.0

It is time to get a bit more from this machine. I’m throwing in 2 GB of RAM. The CPU even though now 2 years old has EM64T Intel extensions (which basically means they implemented AMD’s 64 bits registers/instructions/addressing modes) so it will able to run a full 64 bits FreeBSD system. It will take a bit of tweaking, recompilation of everything (more than 800 ports ouch!) but will be worth the pain in the longer term. It will more on to 7.0 at the same time (ain’t it fun?) to get into ZFS proper (another reason to move to amd64).

September 2009 – FreeBSD/amd64 8.0

The maintenance contract of the D820 machine expired in May, a friend of ours need a new machine so it was time to move on with the “old” keltia. After digging on various articles on CPUs and all that, I’ve settled my mind of a Dell T3500 server with one of these shiny and fast Nehalem CPUs, the E5520 from the Gainestown family. It is using much less power than the regular Core i7 CPUs (they use 135W compared to the 80W of the E5520).

It is a quad-core Xeon class cpu with two threads (effectively making it a 8-CPU machine, the new threading mechanism is much more efficient than the old HyperThreading tech the old P4 CPUs had).

I’m throwing inside 3 320 GB disks, probably running FreeBSD 8.0/amd64 and a full-ZFS system. I just finished a proof-of-concept full-zfs bootable system inside VMware. WIll retry playing with raidz though.

April 2010 – iMac 27"

The three years extended warranty on sidhe expired a few months ago so the question of a replacement came into focus. Keep on going the “big” laptop way, which limits the storage and speed parts? Go for a MacPro and a small laptop like the 13" macbook or even the Air? Or…

Found the dream computer for what I need a big screen for: photography editing…

`lonrach` is born.

iMac with a giant 27" LED screen and a monster CPU (more or less the same as keltia, nehalem class), the quad-core-two-threads Core i7, running at 2.8 GHz and all that. Running Lightroom 3 on this 8-CPU monster is bliss.

The carrying-a-laptop part of sídhe has finally seen as unnecessary, I still have my laptop from $WORK and I have been taking it out almost every time I go to a conference anyway so… A laptop, even with a big disk, is still too limited in screen space (although that can be cured with an external one), more fragile and limited in CPU.

March 2005 – July 2007 – Apple Powerbook 15" G4

A big victory in itself, I managed to get the IT department at EUROCONTROL to buy me and a few collegues Powerbooks G4. It took me two fscking years working with my own laptop – the oh-so-shiny snúadh and finally their refusal to install the VPN software of a private machine.

The Head of the IT department has apparently a big problem with Macs, either because it is not of the “standard” PC crap they give to all others or he feels threatened by the mac rather obvious superiority on Windows machines.

Later upgraded to 1.5 GB of RAM to be able to decently run Virtual PC, the machine is a nice one even though I manage to regularely put it on its knees, working on too many things at the same time. It stayed for a long time with Panther (10.3) because the twits at Checkpoint did not managed to release a Tiger version of their VPN software till June. 2006…

There is a problem of having a 15" (old generation) after owning and working on a 17" (again old generation): one gets used to the bigger screen and more important, the better resolution. The more I use the 15", the more I like the 1440×900 I get on the 17". I think the next sídhe will still be a 15" but the improved resolution (1440×900, same as old-gen 17") will be back.

August 2007 – Nov. 2009 – Apple Macbook Pro 15" LED

After a bit of negociation (not the aforementioned Head of IT), I finally got to replace the Powerbook (hard disk failure was the key) with a shiny new Macbook Pro 15", the new series with the LED TFT screen. So now, rrôn is now 2.2 GHz Core2 Duo with 2 GB of RAM and the standard 120 GB hard disk. Needless to say, this is a very fast machine (22 MB/s peek hard disk speed) and a copy of Parallels for Windows stuff (which I need less and less fortunately). My main usage of Parallels is indeed with FreeBSD…

November 2009 – now – Apple Macbook Pro 15" unibody so called late-2009 model (2nd gen unibody)

Without going into too many details, Jan. 2010 saw a rather big change in the IT dept. at work with the merge of our local IT staff into the bigger one in HQ. With such merge goes a merge in budget and less freedom in what we buy (both in quantity and type of machines). Is this the reason why someone decided to upgrade my not-so-old macbook pro to a late-2009 unibody?

I don’t know and am not sure I care. What I know is that I was asked to define what the “standard” mac should be and there it is, I now have a late-2009 unibody macbook pro (awesome case design) with a 2.4 GHz Core2duo, 4 GB RAM and a 320 GB hard disk. Nice Magic mouse as well.

PS: the name of the machine comes form a book by Holly Lisle called “Memory of Fire”, in the “World Gates” serie.

April 1994 – July 1996 – Tadpole Sparcbooks

I got the first sídhe during my work at HSC, a small consulting company in Internet & UNIX security during 2 years. Had a pretty good time there, it was the beginning of the Internet era in France with more and more people connecting their company. Lots of work. I had two machines during that time, a Sparcbook 2 with 32 MB of RAM and two 512 MB hard disks. Running SunOS 4.1.3/4.1.3u1/4.1.4, I loaded the machine with probably too many things (as usual) but it was able to run without problems. INN, sendmail, X Window, UUCP and more in a single 32 MB machine… After 18 months, I got it upgraded to a faster Sparcbook 3 but with only one disk.

Oct. 1999 – Apr. 2003 – Sony VAIOs

After leaving HSC, I was without a laptop for more than 3 years, I did not feel the need that much and I had plenty with my work and private life. But, going to conferences like Usenix, the need to have a laptop of my own reasserted itself and I fell in love with the subnotebooks from Sony called VAIO. I had two of them, first a PII/366 with 256 MB of RAM IIRC and a 10 GB hard disk, later upgraded to a PIII/700 with 512 MB and 30 GB.

Very nice machine, especially the first as everything was working on it, APM, hibernation, sleep/resume, you name it. The second machine was more difficult to work with, especially with FreeBSD 4 & 5-CURRENT. ACPI is still very fragile and the PIII/700 had only regular sleep, hibernation was not an option.

Still, I enjoyed these two but got tired of fighting PC hardware, especially laptops.

Nov. 2006 – Apple Macbook Pro 15"

This month will hopefully see the rebirth of sídhe, now scheduled to be a expected-to-be-fast Macbook Pro with 2 GB of RAM and a 160 GB hard disk… It seems a good idea to have avoided the first generation of MBP as Apple did make at least four revisions before getting right.

The new sídhe was finally bought before Xmas and delived on the 23th of December. All rejoice!

Awesome machine. Fast, slimmer than the 15" G4 (same size as the old 17") and with the first hours of moderately heavy use (as usual), not necessarily warmer which is Good©®.

Apps like Lightroom and Aperture are now fast enough to more or less instantly seeing modifications made to images. The hard disk is an Hitachi one (not a Fujitsu as previously reported on rumour sites) and seem to be fast enough for a 5400 rpm drive (I saw 13 MB/s transfer speed). Display is very nice, very bright. Airport sensitivy is much better than the G4, wins hands down.

The name has been transferred to the ""keltia.net"" domain name instead of ""freenix.org"". That makes updates much easier.

Now, to play with Parallels and FreeBSD…

UPDATE: after playing with Parallels 2.x and 3.0, I’ve now bought VMWare Fusion which has 2.5 killer features over Parallels (yet). Why 2.5? Just because the third one is a nice addition but not a selling point as the first two are:

• Fusion is able to host a 64 bits system on Core2 Duo-class machines so now, I have a FreeBSD/amd64 to play with
• Fusion is also able to show both CPUs in the guest OS, another winning point because I have a SMP amd64 system!
• Fusion emulates a SCSI sub-system instead of a plain IDE one which means that I can connect more than 3 disks (one slot is taken by the CDROM) and for ZFS testing, it is much better.

UPDATE: after more than one year of perfect service, the hard disk died. Off to AppleCare, I get the machine back, three days later… the new hard disk died too. After the 5th death of a hard disk in the machine (which happened in Apple’s repair centre in Paris while the replacement was being tested!), Apple has finally decided it was time for something stronger.

In one week (we are on Sept., 9th), I’m getting a brand new Macbook Pro to replace the faulty one.

It will be a 15" MBP wih Santa Rosa chipset (yes!) and 4 GB of RAM (instead of the 2 GB I had before) and 250 GB of hard disk (compared to the old 160 GB Hitachi drive). Hat’s off to Apple, now that is what I call service. I expected them to do something after 3 months of no usage of the machine of course but they did it splendidly.

They even offer me to reimburse me prorata temporis for AppleCare and I’ll be getting a new 3 years extension.

April 2003

My first Macintosh ever, given to me as a gift by my SO. I refer to it as my “oh so shiny Powerbook”. A magnificient 17" Powerbook G4. It may seem big – and it is in a way – but it is a very nice machine with lots of screen space. I can have two iTerm windows at 80×40 with a 12-pt font (preferably DejaVu Sans Mono with anti-alias). Got it with 512 MB later upgraded to 1 GB. The 60 GB Toshiba hard disk is a bit slow and of course, HFS is not the fastest file-system either but the machine is fast for a laptop.

I’m in the process of selling it to a friend and buy a Macbook Pro…

UPDATE: snúadh has been finally sold — so long pal and thanks for all the fish!

2000 (?) – 2x Pentium Pro/350

I bought my first dual CPU machine a while ago now, a dual P6/pentium pro machine but CURRENT was a bit too unstable at that time so the machine stayed running 3 as UP. Never managed to really use it so I sold it off to a friend.

Fall 2001 – 2x PIII/800

As I kept on working on FreeBSD as a committer, during the 5-CURRENT era, the need to experiment (and play) with a dual CPU started again so tara was reborn. A very decent and fast machine in itself even with FreeBSD 4/SMP, I managed to do “buildworld” in less than 30 mn… Unfortunetely I also got an electrical problem with it so the machine generally did not managed to reach big uptimes. Started with 4.something, I upgraded it to 4.11 then in the same evening to up 6.0 as it was becoming much more stable and I wanted the 5/6 features like bgfsck and snapshots.

Still off in Jan., 2008

Well, the machine is there, with a lot of data (mainly personal files and mail) but still off after our move to our new flat in Meudon. ENOTIME to really play with it, I don’t knwo what I’m going to do ith it really. For CURRENT work, if I can get a bit of time to do it, I’d rather have an amd64/SMP machine and P3 don’t run amd64. Jury’s still out then. I guess that FreeBSD/amd64 running as a VMWare SMP guest on sídhe basically killed it.