I placed my order on New Egg today for my new Linksys router. Just in time, too. Today, my old one decided to stop forwarding packets all of a sudden. The poor thing has been slowly going downhill for the past couple of months. First the DHCP server gave out, which wasn’t too bad actually, because I got to install one on my mythbox and it’s actually been doing a much better job in the first place. I’ve been thinking of turning that into my router too, but I’ll probably have the new one in a few days anyway.
Overall, I’d say its done pretty well, though. I think I’ve had it for at least two years, probably more. That seems like a good enough lifespan for a small home router. The last firmware update is just barely a year old, so it’s probably already outlived its warranty.
The other exciting hardware news in my life is I picked up a Dell Optiplex Pentium 3 last night from the BYU surplus sale, for only $30. Talk about getting your money’s worth. For a while, I couldnt even get the darn thing to boot into Linux. I reinstalled GRUB a couple of times, but it would just give me the nefarious error 21, and when I tried LILO I wasn’t getting much further. Eventually I broke down and setup a GRUB floppy just so I could boot into the system instead of having to keep chroot’ing. I tried one more time, cleaning out the /boot partition again and just copying the GRUB files manually and reinstalling it in the MBR and it finally worked. Pretty weird.
I’m still not sure what I’m going to do with the thing. I was planning on using it to host this website, but the poor thing is so freaking slow, I’m rapidly reconsidering that option. Other than the MBR oddage, the only beef I have with this thing is that the BIOS setup screen is pretty minimal. Not a lot of tweaking. Oh, I was having problems with ACPI as well, and I stayed up late until I finally managed to get poweroff working with hitting the button. That’s a definite necessity.
So, who knows what I’m gonna do with this thing. It is quiet, so I wouldn’t mind putting it somewhere on the side. Who knows. For $30, I’m not that concerned.