Gizmo
Gizmo is named after the cute Mogwai from the Gremlins movies. I had just given up trying to revive bollskag and decided to have a beer and watch a movie. I picked Gremlins up from the VCD pile and found some stickers of Gizmo in there. In that moment, my machine was named.
Gizmo is going to be a gateway/firewall and IP masquerade box, same as bollskag was. Also, as gizmo is far more powerful and has more disk space, it'll be a mailserver, web-cache, and whatever else I can think of. If you're reading this, gizmo is working.
Hardware
Gizmo was largely made by cannibalizing parts I had left over as well as some new parts. Unfortunately, a 30GB Seagate HDD I had lying around wouldn't spin up, so I had to go and buy a new one (40GB Barracuda) which increased the cost quite substantially. I've also costed those things I had to buy, so you can see how cheap this was. I initially planned to get what I needed for under HKD 500, and I did it for HKD 415, but then the disk wouldn't spin up, so I needed another one.
- HKD 180.00 - ATX case by iCute (with 300W PSU and fan)
- HKD 180.00 - Delta 44x CD-ROM
- HKD 55.00 - Realtek 10/100 Mbs network card (ethernet)
- HKD 820.00 - 40Gb SCSI (Seagate Barracuda) (7200rpm)
- Scavenged - P2B motherboard by Asus
- Now an Abit VH6T
- Scavenged - Matrox G400 Display card
- Scavenged - Soundblaster 64 PCI
- This now has the SB!Live from mojo.
- Scavenged - Pentium II 350 Mhz, 100Mhz FSB
- This now a 1300MHz Celeron
- Scavenged - 2x128Mb Ram (pc100) (from mojo)
- This has been changed to 3x256 pc133.
- Scavenged - misc fans and cables.
- HKD 1235.00 - Total (about US$ 160)
- There's an old TV tuner card in there as well.
Note that the new disk tripled the cost of the system. ($415 to $1235)
OK, OK, not everyone is going to have spare motherboards, processors, AGP graphics cards and RAM just lying around.
Gizmo has no floppy disk drive. The bios on the P2B can boot from CD-ROM and that's how I installed Linux.
Software
Gizmo runs Red Hat Linux 7.1. I just installed everything on the CDs, as there's tons of disk space available. Right now, X is coming up with Gnome which I don't really like. I tried KDE, which is a bit slow. I might leave it in Windowmaker, which is a very nice window manager indeed.
The disk is partitioned as follows:
- 512Mb - /var - 1024Mb
- /tmp - 1024Mb
- /boot - 64Mb
- / - rest of disk (about 35Gb).
This way of partitioning suits me better than the usual way of separating /home and /usr while ensuring that there's plenty of temp space and that the logs can't overrun. This is fine for a single user system. For a multi user system, seperate /home and /usr partitions. Of course, for upgrading the system, separate /home and /usr partitions are a good idea too. Hmmm, may want to revise my partitioning.
Ok, an update much later. Gizmo now has 768Mb of RAM and RedHat 7.2. The partitioning is now along the lines of:
- Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
- /dev/hda12 248M 79M 156M 34% /
- /dev/hda1 61M 7.3M 50M 13% /boot
- /dev/hda14 11G 33M 10G 1% /export
- /dev/hda5 18G 3.7G 13G 22% /home
- none 125M 0 124M 0% /dev/shm
- /dev/hda7 1008M 353M 603M 37% /tmp
- /dev/hda6 2.0G 1.5G 463M 76% /usr
- /dev/hda11 496M 112M 358M 24% /usr/X11R6
- /dev/hda13 248M 4.2M 230M 2% /usr/local
- /dev/hda9 1008M 444M 512M 47% /usr/src
- /dev/hda8 1008M 74M 882M 8% /var
Gizmo shares a Proview 15" LCD Monitor with mojo, via a little switch box.
