Old Tech!

By any measure, an April 2003 manufacture date for a computer, any computer, pretty much defines it as ancient!!! It's a good thing I teach World History in my day job! 

Yet, sitting on my workbench/desk at this very moment is an IBM ThinkPad A31 with that manufacture date. It's not just sitting there; it's booted up and workings it's little P4 heart out doing a few things that I've asked the obsolete Windows XPP to do. Am I going to continue using this machine running Windows XP? Yes and No actually. Yes; I'm going to continue to use this machine (explanations in a minute). No; I'm not going to use Windows XP unless I'm just trying to test out something. And to that end, I'll be keeping the hard drive from it with the OS load intact.... in the hard drive box kinda like those people who have themselves cryogenically frozen. Then, what am I going to do with this computing Centenarian?

This of course! Except in my world, it's a quarter the size, an eighth the weight, and I don't have to buy anything! I'm going to turn it into a portable file server.

"Now, await-a-minute", you say: "so you are trying to do what a little box the size of an external drive can do"!?! I can hear the laughter now..... through the Internet. Actually, the answer is.... kind of..... Yes, I get that these drives like the Corsair Voyager Air can serve files wirelessly in an amazingly small package and do so without even being plugged in. That's cool.... but it's still not a server with a server OS loaded allowing me to have the kind of control that can only happen with an actual operating system. And now that we've established that, that operating system isn't going to be Windows XPP, what am I proposing to do here?

You might have already come to this conclusion already given the hardware. Here are some pluses and minuses associated with using them. FreeNAS can be loaded up on a USB flashdrive, thus freeing up a drive bay for storage. I don't know much about it, so there's that, and I'm going to bet the driver support is going to by a little sketchy when dealing with random devices (more on this later). That should be less of an issue with many of the various distros of Linux, some of which (such as Ubuntu/Zorin) are pretty "mainstream" these days. However, most of these are full-on OS loads requiring an actual disk drive, but more importantly taking one of my precious drive bays. On top of which I don't know a bunch about Linux, although I've loaded up and used both Ubuntu and Mint in the past. 

 

And that takes us to the orphaned Windows Home Server: no I don't even mean the newer "Vail" version which I have running on my Spectre file server right now. I mean the original v.1! Why the heck would I want to do that!?! Well.... I have it, and I have experience with it since I used it with my original Hercules file server. It's driver support will be better since it's based off of the old MS 2003 Server OS. But one of my favorite features of that version was that it had the drive extender function that allowed it to take any random drive you connect to it and aggregate it into it's management scheme. Kinda like Drobo, but in a full OS.

So.... what am I going to do? All of it of course! I'm go to load up FreeNAS on a stick, put WHS on a drive, and probably some version of Linux on another drive. Then I'm going to play with it ALL and see which one I like!

Back to the hardware. What exactly is my point with this exercise other than that I have some A31s sitting around with nothing to do? There is that, of course. The attraction of $0 acquisition cost is pretty nice. But that's not all. Not all old laptops can apply for this "Portable File Server" (PFS) job. It's a bit like that one job at Walmart. There are many senior citizens with time on their hands, but only a few make good Greeters! 

 

The A31 is a special computer.... even by ThinkPad standards. This model is often considered to be the last of the ThinkPad "mobile workstations" until the arrival of the short-lived W70x series. Let's start with what makes it a mobile workstation:

• Availability of very high end (at the time) GPUs along with the then new in mobile computing high res (1600 x 1200) IPS screens, which are still considered to be some of the best ever produced.
• Multiple (2) configurable drive bays dubbed "UltraBay" which could take; optical drives, floppy drives, removable storage such as Zip and LS-120 Superdisk, hard disk drives, battery (in 1), as well as PDA (Palm Pilot) dock and/or "10-Key" number pad.
• Pentium 4m (Mobile) processors in excess of 2ghz.
• Full expansion capabilities including 2 PCMCIA slots and a docking port. This translates to either a port replicator, or the 2631 Dock that had another UltraBay slot, 2 more Cardbus PCMCIA slots, internal power supply AND full length PCI card slot.

  

"Wow", you say.... what in the heck does all that mean? OK, I'll put you outta your misery. All this expansion give the A31 (and A30, but they are PIII) machines the ability to have up to 3 spinning drives of virtually any combination on board. When you add in the dock, it's a 4th drive. The PCMCIA cardbus slot gives it the ability to overcome one of it's deficiencies, which is that it's chipset is so old, it doesn't even have USB 2.0. Yup, that's right.... USB 1.1! So, one Adaptec USB2.0/Firewire card later, it now has the ability to interact with more external drives at a higher speed. And I just so happen to have a 500Gb drive in a Lacie Firewire external enclosure. The full PCI slot in the dock also give me the ability to put in pretty much anything else I might need as well. 

It's no wonder that NASA chose these machine to go on the Space Shuttle and later the International Space Station.

When you combine this machine, it's various modular capabilities, the ThinkPad 2631 dock, and my wife's old Samsonite rolling case; it quickly become a fully portable, file server ready for use in virtually any location at any time. Not bad for a $0 cost build.