koorneef.net server upgraded

In exchange for a dinner our neighbour Bastiaan gave me his old pc. He just bought a new one and his 'old' one still means a factor 4 performance increase wrt to my good ol' 333MHz Celeron ...

So, last weekend was spent swapping hardware, buying some el cheapo network cards. It turned out that Sitecom and Linksys sell 10/100Mbit cards with different pcb layout but with the same chip: AL985 made probably by ADMtek. I was able to find this out quite early by booting the bare system (no harddisks) with a bussiness card linux distro. Linux detected the cards as AL985 Centaur-P adapters and used them with the 'tulip' driver. It was just very cool to be able to start the ssh deamon and log in to this bare system from my old FreeBSD machine to have a look around. I even could browse the net from it, this linux distro used my dhcpd server to get all necessary data. Beautiful ! very much useless of course, but that doesn't matter for the average geek ...


The insides:





I'm very VERY impressed by the speed of the new system. Internet surfing is so much more comfortable ! All the koorneef.net sites are generated faster, and everything is much more responsive.

I had to implement some external changes:

before: and after:

I bought an extra 10/100 card for Fran's pc, so now all internal traffic is upto speed !
I'll use my old 333MHz as a testbed and backup machine.