Performed surgery on a rackmount UPS to replace its SLA batteries.

75$ for batteries, or 400$ for a new UPS. Gee, I wonder which is affordable in this economy? /s

I used the modern eBay app on my modern Android phone to order a nice old Aopen AX6BC slot-1 motherboard... Does that still count?

My cousin brought me her sickly PC. Socket FM2, a pair of conventional hard drives, 16 gigs of DDR3, a GTX 650 Ti. Painfully slow, and it would sometimes spontaneously reboot. I scrounged up a 240 gig SSD, unplugged the existing drives, removed the video card, and installed Win 10 to see how it did. With the A10 6800's graphics the computer was stable with a fresh install of 10. I began looking into upgrading it to Win 11, but there was a hitch. When installing 10 I used the optical drive, but it wouldn't boot to the optical drive when set to UEFI, but only when set to Legacy/UEFI; you cannot upgrade to Win 11 when set this way, the drive has to be formatted in GPT. So I had to reinstall Win 10, but it had to be from a USB drive since this motherboard wouldn't boot from an optical drive in UEFI mode.

I reinstalled Win 10, then upgraded to Win 11, and everything was working fine. I then plugged back in the two conventional drives. One had the old Win 10 installation on about a one terabyte partition, and the other drive was a one terabyte drive that wasn't accessible and needed to be formatted. I contacted my cousin and asked her if there had been any issues with this drive that she knew of, and it soon became clear that she had no idea her computer had two hard drives. She was only worried about files from her Desktop and My Documents on the main drive. I formatted the one terabyte drive, and it then seemed fine.

I ran CrystalDiskInfo and was surprised to see the the main drive that I had assumed was a one terabyte (since that's all that was visible in This PC) was actually a three terabyte drive! I was puzzled at why it had been set up this way, then I realized that they had used an optical drive to install Windows, it wouldn't boot from that drive in UEFI mode, and Legacy mode couldn't properly handle a drive this size. This also explained why she was complaining that the computer wouldn't boot if her two terabyte external drive was plugged in.

I saved all relevant files from this drive to the now formatted and healthy one terabyte drive, and finally had to use Rufus and put an ISO of Parted Magic on a USB drive and format the three terabyte drive to get all of the space. Both conventional drives were only mounted with screws on one side, so I fixed that as well.

When I finished everything was working well, and she now had almost four terabytes of internal storage. I had a PCIe HD7700 card so I put that in. It gave a significant performance boost over the CPU's graphics, and I gave it a test by installing Half-Life 2 and playing to about half way through Ravenholm. The only Windows 11 issue I encountered was that the PC shut itself down after being in sleep mode for a long time, so I changed it to Always On to avoid that. Barring some new Windows Update policy that won't allow updates on older machines I don't see any reason to not update older machines like this for people low on funds.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2026-04-21, 23:33:

and I gave it a test by installing Half-Life 2 and playing to about half way through Ravenholm.

Liar. You played it all 😀

FM2 is really old, an upgrade to a newer platform wouldn't hurt.
I have to give you a firm handshake for the job, deserved.

Nexxen wrote on 2026-04-22, 00:20:

Liar. You played it all :) […]
Show full quote

Repo Man11 wrote on 2026-04-21, 23:33:

and I gave it a test by installing Half-Life 2 and playing to about half way through Ravenholm.

Liar. You played it all 😀

FM2 is really old, an upgrade to a newer platform wouldn't hurt.
I have to give you a firm handshake for the job, deserved.

She's broke, I'm close behind, so getting this one working as is was the priority. I didn't want to charge her for any of the work, but she insisted on giving me some gas money.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2026-04-22, 00:51:

Nexxen wrote on 2026-04-22, 00:20:

Liar. You played it all :) […]
Show full quote

Repo Man11 wrote on 2026-04-21, 23:33:

and I gave it a test by installing Half-Life 2 and playing to about half way through Ravenholm.

Liar. You played it all 😀

FM2 is really old, an upgrade to a newer platform wouldn't hurt.
I have to give you a firm handshake for the job, deserved.

She's broke, I'm close behind, so getting this one working as is was the priority. I didn't want to charge her for any of the work, but she insisted on giving me some gas money.

I understand.
My father had a AM3+ platform until Ryzen 5 2600.
Almost 12 years "because it just works", no need to spend. I bought all used parts for really cheap as the moment was at it's lowest for prices.
Now it'd be at least double the price, RAM not helping at all.

I finally bought a new router to replace the amazingly reliable Netgear R7500v2 I've been using for over 10 years. While hooking it up I realized that the horrible high pitched coil whine that has been emanating from my networking nook was NOT from the old router's AC adapter as I had thought.

And it wasn't from the modem's power adapter... Nope.

And it wasn't even from the bulky UPS that keeps all of that stuff alive during a power outage. Nope!

... it was the teeny tiny little 5v 1A USB adapter that powers the wireless base station for a few LORA-based smart devices in my house (leak detectors, etc.). 😑

So I swapped that out with one of the two or three dozen other ones I have laying around and now my networking setup is silent again.

For close to a year I have had to make sure there is some object between me and the networking stuff since it is like 6 feet from my ear... even a piece of card stock leaning against the shelf was enough to block most of it out. If I didn't do this I would find myself feeling super distracted and eventually on-edge because of this obnoxious noise I could barely tell was there.

I feel really dumb now because I upgraded that base station to a newer model (supplied by the company for free, which was cool) within the past year and never even connected the fact that the noise started around that time. I also rearranged a lot of stuff and just assumed "something" had always been doing that and I just hadn't been within direct earshot of it before.

I am posting this in the hopes that someone else will benefit. If you deal with any annoying whiny devices or power bricks, double check that they aren't easy to just swap out with something else, or at least block them (high frequencies are very easy to block).

The silence is so nice, and my brain is already thanking me for it. 😎🧠

I haven't been feeling well lately, but at least my WiFi is fixed. There's a power_save option in iwlwifi that made the connection more reliable, but it was still giving me missed_beacons errors. Then I updated the distro and restarted, and everything is fixed. I thought power saving was disabled by default. Now I just need to figure out the graphics performance.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-04-13, 21:31:

Actually I avoid Samsung because they think they're Apple, can do what they like, mess too much with the stock Android platform, end up incompatible.

They do but their folding phones are very nice.
I wish you could get Samsung hardware with Google Pixel software.

Updated Fedora on my PC to Fedora 44, had to recompile AeroThemePlasma after but outside of that it's been smooth sailing.

I'm updating my main computer to Linux kernel 7.0. I didn't know that was out yet.

I don't know what this is, but it's getting removed at the same time.

1:: geocode-glib-3.26.4-6 and geocode-glib-common-3.26.4-5 are in conflict. Remove geocode-glib-common? [y/N] y

Not sure if it realllly counts as modern, but today I've been working on porting my silly wiimote-mouse project from Windows to Linux.
It's been an uphill battle, trying to port the code from the very lenient Windows API to Linux-compatible APIs and libraries... I would've done stuff similarly, but honestly I didn't want to mess with Wayland's API so I've already thrown SDL3 in, and I used another library for virtual input too on top of that.

...Is it modern? I mean, it's using modern OSes, but it's also using older hardware that's retro- oh my days the wii is retro now -on the newer OS... Probably counts as modern.

I have only done the basics with those before, just bluetooth setup for the buttons. I hear that trying to get the camera sensor and accelerometer data for tracking can be a bit involved. There were a couple of sites doing it in the mid 10s, but they might have fallen off the interweb since.

There was a cheapo knockoff console that had a wiimote style interface, but you could actually use it on a Windows PC too... kinda sucked, but not sure if it was the whole paradigm of interaction that sucked, or the hardware was not up to snuff.

Then also the Intel at play camera, which was kinda kinnect version 0.0.1 alpha, converting motion tracking to input... I believe there was a linux project for that, but might be too old. I mention that, because it's kinda the mirror image. Wave stuff around in front of a camera sensor, instead of wave camera sensor around in front of stuff.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-05-01, 14:01:

I have only done the basics with those before, just bluetooth setup for the buttons. I hear that trying to get the camera sensor and accelerometer data for tracking can be a bit involved. There were a couple of sites doing it in the mid 10s, but they might have fallen off the interweb since.

Oh, there are actually some open-source libraries like Wiiuse that can interface with the Wii Remote, and that's what I originally used for the Windows version of my project. it can receive IR data, I think it can handle the nunchuck, gyroscope and etc as well.
It actually has packages in Fedora too, so I was able to just sudo dnf install wiiuse-devel and from there I just had to port the code that used the Windows API.

....I'm still kinda annoyed that I've ended up using other libraries to handle actually doing the mouse input and getting the screen resolution (currently inputtino and SDL3 respectively) instead of just using native APIs like I did with the windows version, to be honest. But there is no way I am touching wayland's API with a twenty-five foot pole. the documentation read like it was just soup, and I now understand completely why so many things still use X11 and just run under XWayland-

This is the big project that had me scrounging through old stock, inspiring me to get that old Win98/Dos5 box working again here, and that brought this Vogon back to Vogons. Had to reinstall and juggle things for that old croaker, and I lost the panels for the knuckle-busting case from all the card and hard drive swapping... After considering it closely, it might need a cap replacement on the board--a few of the caps have a slight bulge. And I'll open the PS and see what's what for sure. For now, it works fine once it turns on. Anyway...

So, last January (is it already 16 months?) I started methodically ripping all my DVDs, blu-rays, 4k discs, and music. There was already a lot, mostly discs known to go bad and writable discs (many from Warner Brothers' Archive). Filled up 12 drives (16 to 20 TB) for a total of 157 TB. That's 5065 films, if I catalogued properly, and at least one episode of 392 tv shows. Many are just 1 or a few episodes of old shows like ABC's Wide World of Mystery. Any fans of Dark Shadows?

I had a 12 year old scotch FreeBSD 12.0 server no longer in use, and another box in a cube case built at the same time that never had an OS. The cube just needed a new battery and a video card. It has Kubuntu 26.04 and is running fine for daily use & (some) gaming.

Pulled from the FreeBSD server:
- Supermicro X10 SL7-F, fully populated
- Xeon CPU E3-1231 v3 @ 3.40GHz (Haswell)
- 32 GB EC RAM
- 1 of 2 Samsung #850 256 SSD. Using the motherboard SATA port for this. I might pull the other and mirror them like in the FreeBSD box.
- I didn't know what to with the 8 4-TB drives, but I swapped 2 for a pair of 16TB drives in a Synolgy NAS. 8 TB is more than enough for backup & sharing.

Purchased
- Define 7 XL case + 10 extra drive holders
- Seasonic Vertex GX-1200 power supply
- LSI 9300-16i HBA card. The motherboard can't support 17-18 drives: it only has 14 SATA/SaS ports. 😀
- 4 cables: SFF-8643 to 4x SATA
- Wifi 6E USB 3.0 tri-band adapter from Panda Wireless so I don't trip stepping over the wired network cable.

Installed Kubuntu 26.04

Now I'm converting all the drives to btrfs for its on-the-fly error detection. Copy, empty, repartition, repeat ad nauseum. I found the LSI controller is able to swamp 2 drive-to-drive copies at a time with no slow down: about 200 GB/s each. That's on the smaller pcie slot. It has pcie-3.0 x 8 (in a 16x slot) & pcie-2.0 x 4 (in a x8 slot). I can't think what I'd even do with the pcie3 slot, but holding out for now. No, that old xeon ain't up to video transcoding, which I don't really need, but it might run plex. Wouldn't mind upconverting everything to 4k to stream native. Have to think about it.

Might use snapraid for actual recovery, but then I lose the space of 1 or 2 largeset drives. Many of the films are long out of print (I actually do watch Dark Shadows and the like) and are unlikely to see the light of day again. And I've seen enough lose their bits.

As to the Windows 98 box, I've been looking for a replacement case but aren't happy with anything yet. Tried the old FreeBSD case but after purchasing an extension for the PS-to-motherboard, realized the IDE cables needs to be 2'+2'6" long to reach. I have one 18/24" cable and it never gave me any trouble. Mostly. 😀

You might recognize the monitor I purchased for the DOS box (pun intended) on advice from Vogons... Asus ProART PA248QV. Using it for all three boxen so far. Nice surprise that the built-in video on the Supermicro board can do the full 1920x1200.

Here's the new media server. The metal monster has water cooling tubes running from the main cpu contact hunk through the fins. Far as I can tell, it doesn't even get to room temperature. You can see all the hard drives and the care I took to catalog and cross reference everything, even using paint pens to mark the drives in case something pops up in syslog. The 8 or 16 character SN is useful to match against "lshw -class disk", as is the product name & version. Those longer IDs aren't helpful. See the screen. The screen shows 2 views based on "df -BG" & my notes. Ignore the USB Enclosure section.

SiBurning wrote on Yesterday, 14:14:

This is the big project that had me scrounging through old stock, inspiring me to get that old Win98/Dos5 box working again here […]
Show full quote

This is the big project that had me scrounging through old stock, inspiring me to get that old Win98/Dos5 box working again here, and that brought this Vogon back to Vogons. Had to reinstall and juggle things for that old croaker, and I lost the panels for the knuckle-busting case from all the card and hard drive swapping... After considering it closely, it might need a cap replacement on the board--a few of the caps have a slight bulge. And I'll open the PS and see what's what for sure. For now, it works fine once it turns on. Anyway...

So, last January (is it already 16 months?) I started methodically ripping all my DVDs, blu-rays, 4k discs, and music. There was already a lot, mostly discs known to go bad and writable discs (many from Warner Brothers' Archive). Filled up 12 drives (16 to 20 TB) for a total of 157 TB. That's 5065 films, if I catalogued properly, and at least one episode of 392 tv shows. Many are just 1 or a few episodes of old shows like ABC's Wide World of Mystery. Any fans of Dark Shadows?

I had a 12 year old scotch FreeBSD 12.0 server no longer in use, and another box in a cube case built at the same time that never had an OS. The cube just needed a new battery and a video card. It has Kubuntu 26.04 and is running fine for daily use & (some) gaming.

Pulled from the FreeBSD server:
- Supermicro X10 SL7-F, fully populated
- Xeon CPU E3-1231 v3 @ 3.40GHz (Haswell)
- 32 GB EC RAM
- 1 of 2 Samsung #850 256 SSD. Using the motherboard SATA port for this. I might pull the other and mirror them like in the FreeBSD box.
- I didn't know what to with the 8 4-TB drives, but I swapped 2 for a pair of 16TB drives in a Synolgy NAS. 8 TB is more than enough for backup & sharing.

Purchased
- Define 7 XL case + 10 extra drive holders
- Seasonic Vertex GX-1200 power supply
- LSI 9300-16i HBA card. The motherboard can't support 17-18 drives: it only has 14 SATA/SaS ports. 😀
- 4 cables: SFF-8643 to 4x SATA
- Wifi 6E USB 3.0 tri-band adapter from Panda Wireless so I don't trip stepping over the wired network cable.

Installed Kubuntu 26.04

Now I'm converting all the drives to btrfs for its on-the-fly error detection. Copy, empty, repartition, repeat ad nauseum. I found the LSI controller is able to swamp 2 drive-to-drive copies at a time with no slow down: about 200 GB/s each. That's on the smaller pcie slot. It has pcie-3.0 x 8 (in a 16x slot) & pcie-2.0 x 4 (in a x8 slot). I can't think what I'd even do with the pcie3 slot, but holding out for now. No, that old xeon ain't up to video transcoding, which I don't really need, but it might run plex. Wouldn't mind upconverting everything to 4k to stream native. Have to think about it.

Might use snapraid for actual recovery, but then I lose the space of 1 or 2 largeset drives. Many of the films are long out of print (I actually do watch Dark Shadows and the like) and are unlikely to see the light of day again. And I've seen enough lose their bits.

As to the Windows 98 box, I've been looking for a replacement case but aren't happy with anything yet. Tried the old FreeBSD case but after purchasing an extension for the PS-to-motherboard, realized the IDE cables needs to be 2'+2'6" long to reach. I have one 18/24" cable and it never gave me any trouble. Mostly. 😀

You might recognize the monitor I purchased for the DOS box (pun intended) on advice from Vogons... Asus ProART PA248QV. Using it for all three boxen so far. Nice surprise that the built-in video on the Supermicro board can do the full 1920x1200.

Here's the new media server. The metal monster has water cooling tubes running from the main cpu contact hunk through the fins. Far as I can tell, it doesn't even get to room temperature. You can see all the hard drives and the care I took to catalog and cross reference everything, even using paint pens to mark the drives in case something pops up in syslog. The 8 or 16 character SN is useful to match against "lshw -class disk", as is the product name & version. Those longer IDs aren't helpful. See the screen. The screen shows 2 views based on "df -BG" & my notes. Ignore the USB Enclosure section.

That sure is a lot of hard drives in one ATX case! If you're getting that serious about homebrew data storage, did you consider looking at any rackmount solutions? I've been quite happy using a 4-bay Synology box for quite a while, but it seems they're well into their enshitification cycle and my time with off-the-shelf prosumer solutions may be coming to an end. A shame, because the Synology ecosystem really fits my level of technical expertise (quite middling) and I'm nervous about getting too over my skis by attempting my own TrueNAS box or whatever. It's one thing to follow some guides and get something up and running, it's another to actually live with/maintain/manage it.

Oh hmm, reminds me of back in around 2001 when I did this:

(Yeah count 'em, that's a whole 10 drives. If i recall correctly, not a serious build... just a bunch of spare drives, an unused slot 1 system, and wanting to see if I could get an entire ~terabyte~ into one box. The answer was yes, just barely!)

I looked at 24 bay rackmount server chassis from Supermicro, Dell & the like, both new and used, as well as rosewill, and even external jbod expanders. Was originally thinking to get new hardware, but prices for new are crazy, so it would be a used server. Then I saw the Define 7 XL around when I thought about scavenging the FreeBSD box. That's a definite path with all new or my own hardware and no one's problems to inherit unknowingly. It's also the least expensive option. So I went for it. Path of least resistance and high probability of success. Seemed to me I could always move things to a different case if I ever need more discs, so at worst I have an empty case for another build. But it's done for now, and there's space for 200 additional TV series & 1500 more films even sparing two 20TB drives for parity. I'm only using 158 / 211 TB with dual parity (247 TB total space).

Having done this, I'm a bit leary about how the hard drives trays are mounted. The trays are held in place by sliding two tiny protrusions into a tiny groove & a hole, and then just 1 screw. The drives attach to the trays with the usual rubber grommet/long screw. The two cages on the bottom are better: the trays slide in and the lone thumb screw locks it in for 4 drives total. Wish they did this for all 16 3.5" bays. The Rosewill 16 bay case is looking a wee bit better than before, but I'm not sure of the quality.

BTW, I have a 2 bay enshittsynology. It works fine for Windows boxes, if you have compatible drives which I did not, and that constant head parking sound was scary. But there's no synchronization for linux so I'll be converting something to a proper server for VMs, RAID backup, synchronization, git, web server, and all that good stuff. Probably ZFS RAID on FreeBSD, as I've always preferred BSD over linux. But not for a media server. And WOW! has linux got a lot easier to use since i first tried it... before the Sun exploded.

"just a bunch of spare drives"
There's a name for that now, and a whole lot of fancy terminilogy and articles to make it respectable. JBOD! It's what I just built.

SiBurning wrote on Yesterday, 19:38:

"just a bunch of spare drives"
There's a name for that now, and a whole lot of fancy terminilogy and articles to make it respectable. JBOD! It's what I just built.

Heck yeah!

As for your Win98 machine, my solution to trying to find the perfect retro case, was to not:

Instead, I built a Socket 7 (430TX, not super) P233 MMX system done up like a slick, modern machine. So like, hang on to that Fractal case if you ever move your server out of it...

ubiq wrote on Yesterday, 20:23:

Heck yeah! […]
Show full quote

SiBurning wrote on Yesterday, 19:38:

"just a bunch of spare drives"
There's a name for that now, and a whole lot of fancy terminilogy and articles to make it respectable. JBOD! It's what I just built.

Heck yeah!

As for your Win98 machine, my solution to trying to find the perfect retro case, was to not:

The attachment IMG_3207.jpeg is no longer available

Instead, I built a Socket 7 (430TX, not super) P233 MMX system done up like a slick, modern machine. So like, hang on to that Fractal case if you ever move your server out of it...

Saw that case. Love it for the right build. It has the power supply behind the motherboard so no extension cable necessary. And I liked the white inside & out for a change. It was on my short list before I put the search off. Space for like 100 fans, but was it 2 hard drives and 2 SSDs? I want at least three 3.5" and a 5 1/4". I already installed the 98 stuff in the now empty (smaller) Fractal case, and it just needs long IDE cables. But it's big & heavy. Decided to look for something small & semi-portable so I can drag it into the living room when I want to use it late at night and hide it away otherwise. Or I could CLEAN MY ROOM and make proper space for stuff.