Who Needs Floppies

Send to Kindle

Since I just wrote about my laptop spring cleaning, I may as well get one more geek post out of my system. 😉

I run many Asterisk servers. I love it. That said, I am still running the 1.2.x branch on all of the servers. They are up to 1.4.18.1 on the production branch. I will never install the 1.4 branch. Not because I don’t believe it’s good, but because they are getting close to releasing 1.6 into production (they are currently at 1.6.0-beta6!).

So, I was interested in getting a test machine set up to install it (after it goes production), so that I can get to know it before committing it to production servers. I considered running it on a VM on my laptop, but I really want to avoid that if I can (read my spring cleaning post again for any number of reasons).

I considered buying a used machine on EBay, Geeks.com, Tiger Direct, etc. You can get pretty beefy machines for under $200, and reasonable ones for well under $100 on EBay, but you’re risking the seller, etc.

Last week, while at Zope Corp., I noticed that they were gathering old junk in an area for their own version of a spring cleaning. In that pile were two old machines. One of them was a Dell Dimension 4550, a 2.53Ghz machine, 30GB hard drive, with 256MB of ram. Not exactly the kind of ram you’d like to see, but otherwise more than adequate to power Asterisk. For a test machine, ideal!

I asked (multiple times) if anyone else hoped to snag it, or ever see it again. People laughed (rightfully so). 😉

Into the back of my SUV it went. I stored it for a week in our utility room and today I finally pulled it out. I wanted to install CentOS on it. The other day I downloaded the 3.6GB DVD ISO in a drop over an hour on my FiOS link. Yummy!

I popped the DVD in the drive and booted. Nothing, it just booted into the existing CentOS 4.2 (I wanted to install the 5.1 release). Hmmm. Thankfully I didn’t waste time figuring this one out. I quickly found out that the machine had a CD drive, no DVD. OK, moving on…

I downloaded and burned a CentOS net install CD (only 7.1MB) and booted again. Again, straight into the old CentOS. Hmmm. Somehow, the CD drive isn’t working (boot order was set correctly).

I didn’t have root access on the machine, and it can PXE boot (boot over a network, but I didn’t have a target machine for it to boot off), but it can’t boot off a USB device. 🙁

Floppies to the rescue! My second choice for an operating system was Debian. I downloaded five floppy images for a net install. I booted off of the floppy, and it failed again. This was getting very tiresome…

I booted into the existing system, and tried to mount and read the floppy. It took forever, but finally, I got a clean listing, so there was no hardware problem with the floppy. I tried that with a CD, but it was never able to mount that, so indeed, there is a hardware problem with the CD drive.

It turns out that even though I pressed F12 to change the boot order, and I picked the floppy, it failed. I pressed F2 (for yucks) to get into setup. Once I moved the floppy boot up the ladder, and saved, it successfully booted off of the floppy. Whew.

I now have a smooth running Debian system configured to my taste. I am now patiently awaiting the final release of Asterisk 1.6.0.

So, do we need floppies? Hopefully not going forward. But, as long as there is life in older systems (and clearly there still is), the fact that my four-year-old laptop has a built-in floppy drive ended up saving me some headaches. More important, are you impressed that I had five blank floppies handy as well? 😉