[NTLK] OT The Roadside Scrounge Server & Serverware

Hello Newtonians,
This is very definitely OT, but perhaps somewhat amusing to some of you
others with pack-rat tendencies.

A while back, I stopped and picked up a CPU somebody had put out for
garbage. This is not all that unusual for me to do, but the machine I
picked up and threw (literally!) into the back of my battered '91 Ford
Escort WAS unusual. It was a Compaq Prosignia 500. This didn't mean much
to me at the time, but I could see it had a couple of NICs in it, a CD ROM
drive, and I figured probably a hard drive and maybe some memory SIMMs or
something. I took the old beast home and tried to install Linux on it,
running into some issues with the type of memory. It had something called
Novell NetWare 4.1 running on it with whatever data the previous owner was
using it for. Not being willing to jump through too many hoops to get an
antique like this working, I just stored it in the basement for a couple
years. I guess I figured I might make a Windows 98 machine out of it some
day, but I forgot about it.

Three days ago, while clearing away junk to make room for more junk, I found
the old beast buried under a pile of old monitors and dot-matrix printers.
Scratching my head a bit, I remembered running across some boxed software I
vaguely remembered buying from somebody's bargain table for a dollar a
couple years earlier. It was Novell NetWare 5. OK, I figured that it the
old machine could run an earlier version, maybe it could also run this.

Opening up the box, I found a registration card still sealed in the
envelope. I went online and was (surprisingly!) still able to register it
with Novell. This will no doubt perplex somebody at Novell when they find a
recent registration of a license for eight-year-old non-transferable
software. However, the License Law According to Dale states that
"Previously unregistered software licenses with the registration card still
sealed in an envelope purchased by Dale for a dollar and registered online
by Dale, now belong to Dale."

In any case, after downloading several floppy disk packages from HP, who now
owns Compaq's intelectual property, I was able to get my "new" software
installed and running on the Beast from the Curb. A short time later, I got
a client installed on an old Windows 98 machine I use for my Newton synching
machine.

Eventually, I'll maybe make a print-server, file-server, or web-server out
ot it. The drives are not all that large, but then I don't plan to store
video files on them. Just glancing over the books, I gather that it can do
much more than I would ever need it to do. I have no idea what I will do
with the Oracle 8 CD enclosed in the box as part of the package, but I
suspect I'll think of something.

What I really ought to do is install the software on this Linux machine with
the two 20 GB drives in it, but then I'd have no use for the Compaq, and
that would be sad. I'm not ready to retire that old soldier just yet...
though if I could get Windows 98 installed on it.... hmmm.... just when I
had my LAN all planned out!

Dale the Pack Rat

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