For a moment there I was thinking this might have all been for naught. Turns out though, I just didn't have the 20 pin connector snugged in tight enough. It does run! How embarrassing, but by admitting these small snafus we can all learn to not feel stupid by simple mistakes.

There was also a brief moment where I thought the power supply wouldn't fit, and I was genuinely confused as to why, but then I remembered that I had bent the tab that the psu normally sits on backwards to try and fit the old Dell psu. There's a picture below where you can see the rectangle-shaped cutout toward the back of the case in the upper-righthand corner. That's where the tab bends forward into the case to act as a little shelf for the psu. It's really not needed, but it does help you guide the psu into place so that the mounting screws are easier to line up.

🔧 More Spare Parts

Digging around through the closet, I did find a monitor and a keyboard. Both are from the Frakenstien Dell. I also came across another PCI WiFi card, so I went ahead and threw that in as well. I know it's a different chipset from the Linksys one that I have in there right now, and I do remember Slackware being quite finicky with WiFi adapters, so I figured it couldn't hurt. Plus, it's one more adapter toward my goal of having separate adapters for each VM I want to run.

The monitor doesn't have a stand... At least I don't think that it does (EDIT: I have found the stand, but I don't know where the screws for it are). If I remember correctly both the monitor and the keyboard are from the Debian database server that I built for work some 10+ years ago. After the office shut down, those things found their way into my possession (with permission of course). The monitor is indeed a 4:3 aspect ratio, which is kind of bad ass. It's almost better than tearing apart a Chromebook and re-purposing the LCD. I think it's perfect for a machine that I have no plans of installing a graphical environment on.

There's definitely something wrong with these old hard drives though. I've been sitting here looking at the “formatting” prompt for quite some time now. I was about to just buy the drives I want on Amazon when I clicked on a Kingston SATA SSD thinking I should probably have an OS/boot drive that is as fast as is possible with this board, and Amazon reminded me that I've ordered that same item two other times. One is in the desktop that I'm on right now and using to type this post, the other is in a Macbook Pro that I bought last year as a project device to work on. I'm going to sit here and wait for this formatting prompt and see if it actually get through the process. If so, then I might be able to use it, but if it goes too long, and I'm headed to bed while it's still running, I'll probably just power down the...

HOLY SHIT! It finished... The question now though is, do I format the other partition?? I do want the use of ALL The space... I don't know if the speed is what I need though. Especially not if I need to back up data. BUT... I'm going to do it anyway. Let's format this other chunk and hopefully walk away with 1TB of usuable space. OH, yes, I found another drive... An old Seagate that I have bought for my Dad back in 2015 when we built the PC that he's still on to this day, running the same install of Ubuntu 14.04. His PC still works, doesn't get any updates, but the version of Firefox that is on the machine handles most of the web just fine. It's an incredible miracle. The Seagate drive on the other hand is not working at all and must be thrown in the trash.

Alright, time to select the packages that I want to use.

Most everything is deselected... I may need to install other packages later, but honestly, it's just going to be headless, so there's not a lot that is needed. The networking stack of packages should have SSH and NFS in it... Setting up Qemu or Xen will be a project for after the machine is already talking to the other computers on my network. My hope is that it will see at least one of the nics and I can get comfortable with connecting to wireless access points from command line. That's actually something that I never do in Linux. I mostly use desktop distros, or distros that have a solid out of the box desktop experience, and a lot of the time, using your wireless adapter and picking what WiFi signal you want to connect to is just a matter of clicking on it and entering the password. We'll see.

It is installing...

It's stuck on Rust right now though... I blame Primeagen.

After all that I couldn't get it to connect via WiFi. It does recognize both wireless nics, however, the wpa_supplicant program was having issues finding a library file that it needs. So I've gone back to the install, since I have the space, I've decided to just do a full install. Which means it will have a bunch of crap on it that I won't ever use, but it's easier than trying to do an expert install.

The entire experience really has me just remembering all the other times I spent fucking around with Slackware never getting it to do exactly what I wanted it to do. I mean, Arch may be easier to deal with at this point. But honestly, I'm heavily leaning toward FeedBSD.

Installation is complete though.

What's Next?

Configuring the box. My goal is to make sure that it's connected to my network and I can SSH in. Once I can do that, then I can unplug the monitor and keyboard and just leave it on.

I am writing this in the future, I can tell you that Slackware remains a pain in my ass and I've considered buying some red spray paint so that I don't have FreeBSD installed on a machine in a green case.

So I was sort of right in my guesstimation about which, or what, parts I had. Unfortunately, about the only thing you can swap out of a Dell are the hard drives, PCI cards, and maybe the memory sticks. I thought I could get away with cannibalizing the power supply, which would have meant that I could've gotten this Green Frankenstein up and running last night... That didn't happen.

The Build

In an effort to get this thing up and running without buying anything, I thought that I would tear apart an old Dell that has been sitting in the closet. I have no idea what model it is or what the specs are for it, it was my wife's old PC. I do see that it has some sort of an aftermarket graphics card and that it was built for Windows XP, as evidenced by the sticker with the XP serial number on it. I vaguely remember her using it when we first moved in together (two houses and an apartment ago), if I remember correctly it was old even a decade ago. So it was a long shot that the psu would even be good. She has no idea what's on the hard drives even... I'll be able to find out once I can power it on boot to it... Yes, I had planned on buying new hard drives, but I sniped the two that were in her old Dell; one was 320GB and the other is a 500GB, both Western Digital drives running at 72k.

The one component that I don't have a spare or an extra of is a power supply. Just last week the power supply on my Dad's PC went out, so I ordered one and swapped out the old one for him. I think just the act of doing that, removing and installing a power supply, combined with having the experience of a good exchange on Mastodon with a total stranger who is putting Linux on an old HP Proliant server has sort of sparked my interest in doing this project. It's been a long time since I've played around with old hardware to make something new. I have grand plans now...

I've been bitten by Dell's proprietary bullshit in the past too. Actually, back when I did field repair, we had a customer who's PC had died, not unlike the way my Father's unceremoniously did. On my way to do the job I stopped at Fry's (R.I.P.) to pick up a power supply. It wasn't on the work order that the customer had a Dell, or what model of Dell it was. So, without bothering to call ahead to get more information, I bought a standard ATX psu. Sure enough, his Dell simply wouldn't accept the power supply that I had bought. I felt like an idiot, especially since it was quite obvious that the power supply didn't fit, and there was not way to finagle it.

Interestingly enough, the power supply from that old old Dell is ALMOST the same size as a regular ATX one, just eyeballing it, I thought for sure it would fit. Turns out it's only a couple of centimeters too long. Provided it would have mounted, there are other issues as well; the 20+4 power connector has a ridiculously short cable, and even if I did want to modify the case to accept this Dell power supply, it wouldn't have mattered because that cable wouldn't reach to where I need it on the motherboard that I'm using.

So, as to not wasting the time I spent tearing apart the Dell, as mentioned above, I did swipe the hard drives from it. RAID is nice, but I might actually just use the drives independently of one another. The 320GB can hold the host OS, the 500GB drive can hold the images for the VMs I want to run, and then the last drive can be mapped and mounted as one large share file across my home network (for the VMs as well as my laptop and desktop backups).

🪛Parts to Order

Power Supply – Needed A power supply unit (“psu” or “power supply”) is the one thing that I absolutely need to buy. I opted to just get the same one that I bought for my Dad. The “APEVIA VENUS” is the best value that I could find, under $30 for 500W. That's more than enough... In fact I'm half tempted to pull apart my main desktop and see what power supply I bought three years ago, I don't think the one I'm running in there is even rated for 500, I might consider snatching the psu out of my desktop and putting the brand new one in there rather than use it for this project. Whatever I have in my desktop would also be more than acceptable for this project.

The PSU will be here tomorrow (by the time this is posted).

Large SATA Drive – Optional I'm thinking about a Western Digital Blue drive. 4TB for less than $80 is a pretty good deal. So, for just over $100 I can get the PSU and a drive that I can start using to organize all the data I want backed up. I'm waiting to buy another drive until after I get everything booted and I'm confident it's going to be stable enough.

Some of you are probably thinking, “well, what about Seagate?” Yes, they are a better deal, but I've never had a Western Digital drive die on me that wasn't abused over a long enough timeline. Whereas, I've had Seagate drives be delivered DOA. It just something that I don't want to deal with. Hitachi and Toshiba are second and third place on my list. Kingston is fourth. Seagate is below whatever the hell off-brand I can get on Ali Express.

Shorter SATA Cables – Optional Three drives is manageable, but if I want to stick more drives in there, cable management is going to start to be something I'll have to worry about. I've never seen it done, but from what I understand, you can shorten your SATA cables, and there have been people who have done it. Reminds me of when people were “rounding” their IDE cables. There don't seem to be any shorter than 6 inches that I can find for sale. You can kind of see in the picture above, the light blue connectors are the SATA ports on the motherboard, and the HDDs are right there. I don't even need a 3 inch cable for that. What I might end up doing is flipping the drives around and threading the SATA data cables through the back and around.

🗿What's in a name?

I don't know what to name this machine. Traditionally I've always named my PCs after ships or mobile suits from the Gundam anime franchise. Gundam Wing is my favorite series, and a number of the mobile suits in that show were named after Zodiac signs (Leo, Aries, and Cancer), so my network is called “Zodiac”. But I draw inspiration from all the various entries in the franchise. Currently my desktop is named “Whitebase”. One of my old laptops was named “Albion”. So I'm not sure where to go with the name this time. I'm thinking about possibly calling it “Tallgeese”. That particular mobile suit had a really cool story arc all it's own. Destroyed and then rebuilt as something better, that's kind of the story behind these parts.

The motherboard and cpu that I'm using for this project came from the second PC I that ever built after moving to Vegas. The first was a Frankenstein Dell machine. The case was entirely stripped and was the result of two Dell internals being mashed together. But once I earned some money I decided to buy everything I needed to build a good PC.

What's Next?

It's a matter of slapping the psu inside the ulgy green case and installing the OS. Maybe doing a little exploring of the drives that were in my wife's computer and backing up anything on there that might be worth saving. I know she played a lot of Sims and WoW, so there's no telling what could be on those hard drives.

I'll have to look and see if I still have any spare keyboards and monitors. I think that I do, but I'm not sure... I have a bunch of old laptops scattered around that aren't good for much.

While I have no experience with refurbishing LCDs, I have seen some LCD conversion kits online. It would be awesome to be able to use the LCD from my old Asus Chromebook with the fucked up keyboard. It's also one of the first Chromebooks they ever released, so the rest of the hardware isn't of much value to anyone, especially since I spilled beer on it and can no longer log in since those keys don't work. Replacing the keyboard is definitely time and cost prohibitive, I may as well try and salvage some hardware from it.

Pipe Dreams and the Future

This is me getting ahead of myself, but also trying to anticipate any obstacles I might encounter. Everything is going to be headless/commandline, so I can't see the processor or the amount of available memory as being an issue. However, the network connection(s) it has probably will be important. A 4-port ethernet card and a relatively cheap WiFi router that can run OpenWRT might be the first upgrades I purchase if the system behaves the way I anticipate.

I'll run each of the nics to their own port on the router and have the router set up to be a bridge so that it's just an extension of my main router. That way I can have individual network interfaces for each VM, while still allowing the box itself to be wireless and away from the living room where the cable is piped in. I'm anticipating that one of the bottlenecks I'll face is a single network interface if I'm trying to do something with multiple VMs all acting as their own servers (wired or not).

I've desperately wanted a reason to build a Slackware server for quite some time now. Just recently, someone on Mastodon finally gave me a great idea for what I could do if I ran one. There is a bunch of old hardware sitting in my garage just collecting dust. As much as I would love to buy some refurbished server hardware to play with, at the end of the day I'm not going to be doing anything too special with whatever hardware I use. So I may as well try to just re-purpose the stuff I already have.

🖥 Hardware:

Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition

Memory: 8GB of DDR3 @ 1333 (Maybe? I need to check the speed. It's also possible there is 16GB installed.)

Motherboard: Asus M4ABBT-M

Case: Random used ugly green case gifted to me approximately 10 years ago.

Intended Use ?

I'm thinking of using Slackware as a hypervisor to host a few VMs. All the VMs will be headless, and the box itself will be headless once it's setup as well. But I'm not entirely opposed to the idea of containers and learning Kubernetes and Docker... If I can get all of the virtual machines to simply show up like individual machines on a network though, I'm going with VMs, I would actually like to play around with managing a network of machines without actually having a full network of machines to deal with. From what I understand, Qemu let's you simply define an IP address that can be used from either the host machine, or machines on the host's network. Meaning, if anyone were to log onto my home network and run an nmap, they would think it consisted of several physically distinct machines, rather than one box running multiple virtual machines.

Also, I want it to be a backup server as well, for my desktop and laptop. In the past I would have run rsync, not sure if that's a viable tool these days, I'll have to see what is available for both Debian Bookworm and Slackware 15, or what the preferred method of backing up is these days. I'll want to run weekly backups at least, and then maybe monthly longer term storage backups. Thankfully the board I have does have RAID, and 6 SATA slots. Finding refurbished Western Digital drives shouldn't be a problem.

The real question is whether I have the host Slackware instance handle the backups or do I go full inception and run my backups into a VM, then backup the img file to a separate storage medium. I only have around 2TB of data that I want backed up right now. Backing up an img file would be a lot of extra unnecessary bytes, but it does give me the ability to just deploy it on any machine that can run Qemu, and access my data quickly if I have to restore from a backup. Pros and cons to everything I guess. At my last job we had a Dell Poweredge R320 (or something similar) running ESXi that had a single Windows Sever instance on it. Never made sense to me.

Why Slackware?

Nostalgia, maybe? It was the first Linux distribution I ever spent any serious time with. Also, theoretically, once it's configured, that's all there is to it. You don't need to constantly make changes to the system to maintain it, which is not the same as running other Distros—or for that matter, running a desktop versus a server. You're usually not actively upgrading the system once you get it setup to your liking. You're only ever upgrading the bits of software you're actually using and whatever dependencies the software you're using needs. Slackware also really leaves it up to you, so if there are any security patches, it's going to be up to me to stay up to date with that stuff and actively maintain my machine. Now, that being said, if I do run into any weird issues (because I have in the past with Slackware) I may just abandon it in favor for vanilla Debian, possibly FreeBSD... I've also always wanted to use straight Unix for a server as well.

What's Next?

Well, I'm actually writing this in the future. Next post you'll read about me putting the thing together.