This is actually the second round of closet cleaning we've done, but this one included a lot more really old stuff. Photographic proof is under the cut.
The pile of old crap in the hallway is quite impressive. As you can see, we've managed to keep at least a pedestrian walkway through the crap.
Behind that pile, hidden by the crap, are the paper and can recycling bins. We kinda sorta walled those off with crap. When they come by to empty those, they're not getting emptied this week. We've sent the paperwork off to Surplus so in theory they're on their way to pick up this pile of crap.
Notable crap in in this picture:
Notable crap in in this picture:
- Those black boxes in the lower left hand corner. These are some very old Web Cache servers from well before I worked here. They had PATA drives inside them (small ones), and had University of Washington (not WWU) inventory tags on them. We're all one big state here, so we can still get rid of them.
- The faceless server on the bottom right. That is an old HP LH3 server. On top of it is the server generation that replaced it, the venerable HP ML530. Topping that are a pair of Dell servers that we got from other WWU departments.
- The caseless whitebox sitting on top of a monitor in the middle of the frame. Actually more of a yellow-box due to age. It's a 486/66 DX. It has a turbo button. Aww.
The crap-pile, from a different vantage. Note the pathway. Note the lack of a path to the right-hand wall where the recycling is. There are a couple more ML530s in this picture. The pile of loose crap on top of the ML530 on the table is mostly rack-rails for all the dead servers in this pile, with a few miscellaneous odds-n-ends.
Hiding in that pile are some other choice things:
This is what happens when you give geeks big closets. You get archeology. The only reason we don't have even older stuff is that this building was built in 1999-2000 so anything already in a dead pile didn't get moved in.
Hiding in that pile are some other choice things:
- An elderly HP Powerwise UPS that doesn't work.
- Several late 486 early Pentium era workstations.
- Several workstations with 5.25" floppy drives.
- A small pile of ISA network cards.
- That IBM AT I talked about, which actually has a newer motherboard in it, and an AMD 386-clone CPU.
- Even more monitors.
This is what happens when you give geeks big closets. You get archeology. The only reason we don't have even older stuff is that this building was built in 1999-2000 so anything already in a dead pile didn't get moved in.
Interesting coincidence....
I work for UW central IT (UWIT) and have been following your blog for a few months now. Glad to see that those black monsters of ours are finally disappearing. I seem to have a vague recollection of someone recently asking my group (we manage servers) if we knew anything about a couple of servers who's description matched that of what you are surplussing. I'm wondering now if they were asking on your behalf. :)
Your pictures are a great stroll down memory lane, at any rate.
That is too funny.
When I got here in December of 2003, those big black boxes were already stacked in the closet we cleaned out. I wondered why they were there since they're clearly UW tags and we're not UW. Since then I've never heard mention of any web-cache servers on our network. There was a brief mumble about it from the old-timers when we hauled them into the hall, but nothing informative. I'm not 100% sure they were ever actually used.