The Little Garden, News for July 1993

by Tom Jennings

Since there's been few questions on the last membership meeting,
I'll assume everyone by now knows what went down, and I can avoid
boring everyone with a summary. It boils down to this: we are down
to a very few options to persue re: connectivity, and we're persuing
them. As of today (14 July, hmm, a bit late) everyone's off at IETF
in Amsterdam, but next week we'll get some decisions made on
proposals we'fve put forth. Down to about three serious ones.

AND NOW THE BAD NEWS:

All of it at this location -- the computer I use to do TLG biz
(invoicing, records, etc) died hard. And worst-case Murphy's Law
-- *all* of the backups on two different media types failed! I use
QIC-40 (three tapes in rotation) and a one-off floppy copy of TLG
records.  The diskette has a read error in the data file, and *last
Friday* PM I found that the tape drive had been writing unreadable
tapes.

Funny, but I was going to make a plea for hardware soon for reasons
I'll lay out below. Now it's a lot less optional.

My Internet host is a 386-25MHz that's old enough not to have SIMM
memory. It's got SIPPs, 8mb max. With my 92 tax return I bought
two 4MB SIMMs and one of those horrid buss-memory cards, for a
total of 16mb -- half of which runs at ISA buss speeds. My 386BSD
X windows scroll at equiv 2400 baud or less. Yes, I have async
scroll set. The idea was, when I get the bucks I'll get a modern
motherboard with SIMM sockets, and another two 4mb SIMMs.

My DOS box *used to be* this 386. It had my QIC-40 tape drive, and
it worked reasonably well. There is a very good chance that the
backups will be readable with enough processor (it's a "floppy
tape" interface).

When I put up 386BSD unix so that I could do this net job, it split
my already-meager resources between two software/hardware systems.
I had to get a 386BSD-supported tape backup (QIC-02, ie.  DC600XLs
@60mb ea), above memory, a 2nd IDE drive (orig 105 + 200, runs
about 30mb free), and enough tapes at $20/ea to do backups (two
full dumps plus incrementals) (Randy Bush donated 10 tapes).


Basically I'm asking for hardware donations. A minimal solution
would be a SIMM-based 386 or -- gasp -- 486 motherboard (DX not
SX) and two more 4mb SIMMs, to install in my BSD box, it would run
at full speed, and I could put put my 386/SIPP box back into DOS
duty (more than adequate) I'd probably be set.

If anyone has any solutions I'd love to heam them...