"Tony 'Nicoya' Mantler" <nicoya@apia.dhs.org>  wrote:
 > My SGI Indigo2 could have been co-branded by Hoover with the amount of dust
 > it sucks in. Ditto for my PowerMac 9600, though that's partly because I
 > have it on the floor.

Which is amusing because the Indigo2 chassis was designed by Compaq.

 > I've found that average PCs need anywhere from a dusting every two years,
 > to yearly dustings, while my workstations demand at least one dusting every
 > 6 months, the worst probably being my Indigo R3k, which will start to flake
 > out after about 3 months from dust.

Indigo's have a single-stupid fan in the power supply and no significant
air-flow ability, from what I've seen.

What I find completely interesting now is that OS stability has improved
such that you now _have_ to take down a perfectly happy running machine
for PM's and hard-disk replacements.

I have machines in a rack in Sweden.  Live production website that gets
a couple million hits a day.  One of the machines is coming up on 3 years
of uptime, another at 2.5 years, and a 3rd I accidentally rebooted because
I was mistaken about which console I was connected to.  I expect IDE disks
to have an average lifetime of about 4 years.  It's going to be sad to
have to shut a machine down to replace a disk that has only had to load the
OS once.

This is stuff I haven't seen since the old VAX days.

Getting back closer to on-topic for this list... I discovered recently 
that you can plug a CDROM drive into a Netra/X1 and have it work just
fine.  

Just in case any of you ever discover yourselves in a bind.