I was in one of my cus­tomer's dat­a­cen­ters the oth­er day, and while I do most work re­mote­ly, I had to take this op­por­tu­ni­ty to take some snap­shots of their proxy serv­er.

This post is just a bit of fun. This is not sup­posed to be their server, it was just a stop­gap mea­sure be­cause of mul­ti­ple hard­ware fail­ures. This is a large, well man­aged com­pa­ny, and this ir­reg­u­lar sit­u­a­tion will be fixed soon. And any­way, it is work­ing just fine.

As you know, Lin­ux can do that kind of job easy with­out much hard­ware re­quire­ments. Af­ter al­l, it has to han­dle at most about 3Mbps of data, and this box has 2GB of ram, so there's plen­ty of room for a speedy cache.

So, let's go for some good news/bad news.

Good news: It's a true-blue IBM Server! Bad news: It's a IBM Netfin­i­ty 5000 (mod­el 3Ry)!

Here is some tech in­fo from IBM about it.

Good news: It has 2 CPUs! Bad news: They are two 450Mhz Pen­tium II CPUs.

Good News: it has hot-swap­pable SC­SI disc­s! Bad news: you have no discs for that con­troller, so we will use this 8GB IDE (PATA) disk!

And will leave it just sit­ting there by the CD unit, be­sides the huge gap­ing hole in the front where the SC­SI discs would be.

Bad News: it has a ten­dence to over­heat­ing! Good News: You have a place to keep your coffe war­m!