(This page is where I used to maintain a catalogue of all the machines I was acting as Systems Administrator for in my spare time; but it makes more sense to centralise that information onto the Xibalba Network page.)
When I became a professional techie in 1999 I obviously had to finally stop hogging the flat's communal server in the kitchen and build myself a workstation of my own – as I'd been saying for years, computers practically come free in cornflakes boxes. Hurakan has never been bleeding‐edge (it has seen a good few crumbly hard drives, fried power supplies, and multimedia‐incapable video cards), but it was good enough for me, and it gradually collected upgrades from other people's junk‐piles all through the next decade until I celebrated the year MMX by finally getting myself something in‐warranty.
I have also always tended to have one or two extra machines under my desk at any given time, either as testbeds for the latest hardware and software or just on standby for the inevitable. Old computer hardware seems to exert a gravitational force of its own: without me making any active effort to acquire it, more and more just accumulates on top of my wardrobe – the stack reached half a dozen complete machines before my last big clearout, and that's not counting the unbootable hulks.
It would be really painful trying to do all this with the latest
Microsoft operating systems (not to mention being either expensive
or illegal), but of course what I'm
mostly running is Debian GNU/