Bringing an IBM PS/2 Model 50Z back from the dead. Trying out a McIDE-CF for the first time, getting PC-DOS 6.1 installed, and of course another token ring card failure.
I'm a really big fan of long-form content and this might be my longest video yet (didn't quite beat the elusive one hour mark though, maybe next time!)
Video live tomorrow afternoon!
A bunch of IBM gear has shown up the past 24 hours, let's unbox it.
2025-03-29 02:57:26 +0000 UTC View Post
Finally getting Windows NT 4.0 installed on the Compaq DL-380. It took a lot of input from you all and others, but I win in the end. Then lose big time by throwing a token ring card in.
Video up tomorrow afternoon!
Taking a look at another PS/2 55SX.
2025-03-21 04:12:58 +0000 UTC View Post
Utterly failing to get Windows NT 4.0 installed on a Compaq Proliant DL-380 Gen 1... but hopefully it's a fun ride anyway. I suspect I'm very close and missing something small, but unfortunately I am out of time this week to keep at it. I'll be back on this machine behind the scenes though, I'd really like to have a solid NT 4.0 server to experiment with! Would love to hear what other things you think I should try.
Video up tomorrow!
Bringing an IBM PS/2 Model 55SX back to life, with some future token ring RIPL plans!
Video going live on the channel Friday.
2025-02-27 02:27:39 +0000 UTC View Post
Next video will be getting this 55SX into fighting shape. In a follow up video I'll try to boot it over a token ring network with IBM's Remote Initial Program Load!
2025-02-26 06:12:12 +0000 UTC View Post
Installing some new shelves in the workshop and discussing some other future improvements!
2025-02-17 21:48:35 +0000 UTC View Post
I've made an absolute mess down here filming the last few videos so I've been organizing the shop all day. I've come up with a bunch of quality-of-life changes, particularly with my main workstation setup. I took away the left monitor (it was on a Win10 machine I never used) and I'm going to add a shelf there instead.
More shelves going in up top for storage as well. I also realized I can better leverage the Dell KVM I have, I'm going to mount that behind the wall where my machine actu...
First of many token ring videos! I cover a lot of ground, setting up some Windows 95 machines and experimenting with some Cisco token ring port adapters, but don't quite get it working. Looking forward to your comments!
Video live on Friday.
Consolidating my homelab dial-up setup from a Cisco 2911 and 2600 into a single Cisco 3725, complete with 8-port analog modem card! We get a blistering 14.4Kbps... but hey, that's all I ever got half the time back in the early 2000s anyway!
Video should go live on the channel Friday!
I can't guarantee it's the next video, but 2025 is the year of clabretro token ring. MAU from eBay incoming.
2025-01-25 04:53:52 +0000 UTC View Post
Finally figured out why I couldn't dial into a Cisco 2509's AUX port using USR modems. Who had their money on... cabling?
2025-01-23 05:35:43 +0000 UTC View Post
A very early pre-release — I'm out of town for a long weekend so I wanted to get ahead of it. Video goes live Friday!
This one was an adventure — trust me when I say I tested a massive matrix of combinations across all the modems I had, but only had luck locally in the workshop, as you'll see. Let me know what you think!
Ordered a pristine (but probably inoperable) Buffalo TeraStation NAS on eBay and, well... you'll see what happened to it.
2025-01-12 00:36:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Snuck in one last video for 2024 and, that's right, it's about V.35 cables. We'll get a couple Cisco routers on either end of some CSU/DSUs, using the V.35 cables of course, and get them talking over a T1 connection!
Video very likely to go live Monday afternoon. Thanks again for all the support, it's been an amazing year for the channel!
The saga comes to an end, finally able to stack two Nortel BPS 2000s!
Happy holidays!
There's some blank video between 5:22 and 5:42, no missing footage just a gap in the timeline I missed while editing 🤦♂️
Learning how to set up port mirroring on a Cisco 2950 and using it to troubleshoot a Cisco Cache Engine.
Video goes live Friday!
Revisiting a ChannelPlus Caller ID video overlay device, but this time feeding some real Caller ID info into it via some Cisco gear!
Goes live tomorrow!
Getting Solaris 8 installed (well... kind of) on a Sun Fire V100 via JumpStart from a Solaris 10 VM. I want to use this V100 as a dedicated physical JumpStart server in the retro rack.
Video goes live tomorrow!
Taking a look at Cisco CE-505 I've never been able to get booting properly. Let me know if you have any ideas!
2024-12-02 00:12:08 +0000 UTC View Post
Taking a look at a Linksys Wireless-B "Internet Video Camera" from the early 2000s! This thing was super fun to play around with and I think it would've been pretty impressive back in the day.
Odd timing wrapping this one up, I'll probably post it live on the channel tomorrow or Wednesday.
Quick video going over some new gear!
2024-11-07 16:30:37 +0000 UTC View Post
Diving into this new in box Sun Ray 150 for an upcoming video. Haven't powered it up yet but it's looking really promising.
A very odd side note about it, this unit belonged to a company called Access Graphics, a big Sun distributor in the late 1990s, who just so happened to be operated by John Ramsey, the father of JonBenét Ramsey, a six year old girl who was mysteriously killed in her home in Colorado in 1996. So that's weird.
After months of overthinking it, I finally dove in this weekend and just built the thing. Wrapping up a video (the first of many) covering the initial build out, pre-release coming very soon!
EDIT: just kidding got excited, video is live!
I've always been fascinated by Iomega, the Zip 100 drives of course being my first experience with them back in the day. But they made a ton of other stuff. I used to have a really big collection of Iomega stuff (the last three pictures), but donated it all during an apartment move about five years ago.
Well, I've started diving in again. The first two pictures are recent acquisitions. Also picked up a pair of Zip 100 drives at VCF Midwest. Not sure when but I'll definitely be covering...
Getting a CacheFlow SA-725 from 2001 up and working, along with a somewhat-faithful recreation of a load test Network World did when they reviewed this thing back in the day.
Live on the channel Friday!
I've been busy today. Follow along as I fail once again to stack these things. But, we will indeed get them running the same version of software and see what that whole process is like!
2024-09-29 23:46:25 +0000 UTC View Post
Taking a look at stuff I've picked up recently on eBay and at VCF Midwest, as well as some channel donations.
I started archiving those Novell disks and it looks like they're training and testing materials!
Taking a look at a pair of Nortel Networks Business Policy 2000 switches from 2001. Software will ultimately thwart our stack attempts, but it was fun looking over these units and getting them running again.
Video goes live Friday!