I tried to get Alicia up on Sunday. Alicia is the current name for my eight- year old PowerMac 6100/60. The original low-end model of PowerMac which I bought I think in April of 1993. I remember that Dave had just bought a 68040 machine, a Quadra I think. Envious about his fast machine, I could only hold out for a couple of months before I commited and bought the PowerMac at CompUSA. It was a stock machine but I also bought a CD ROM drive (I think a fabulous 4x speed) and a huge 32 MB of memory -- then as now I think memory is more important than hard drive space, to a certain point. I think I may have gotten a larger hard drive too since I remember it being 230 MB or so rather than 160 MB (long ago replaced so I don't have it around anymore).

Anyway, I hooked up all the cables and turned it on and nothing happened. Luckily, I remembered seeing this before on my Mac IIsi. When the battery dies you can't start the computer. I had a spare 1/2AA lithium battery that I probably bought years ago for just such an emergency (good thing lithium stores well, not as well as alkaline but well enough). Popped the sucker in and the computer started up fine. I had System 7.6.1 installed and it was a small matter to reconfigure the machine (it was still set up as Jennifer) and copy a bunch of files over. Then I tried to install Netscape 4.78 and it killed the machine. Now it can't find a boot volume.

It may be a bit hard to reinstall System 7 on it since the CD drive is long dead (or at least very badly working). So that would mean using another Mac to install the OS on one of the external drives. But the other Mac I have is a PowerBook G3 which came with Mac OS 8, so I doubt I'll be able to get System 7 to install with it. Actually there is another alternative. Use my Mom's Performa 6400 to install System 7. Means I'll have to wait until I go home again, but I'd have to do that anyway since I left the 7.5 CD at my parents.

While Alicia was still working, I did set up the old LaserWriter IIntx. It took me a while to figure out how to hook it up as an AppleTalk device on the network (it uses LocalTalk, which requires LocalTalk connectors, not just a plain serial cable). Unfortunately, once I tried printing I remembered why I wasn't using it -- it doesn't feed paper anymore. Actually, it used to feed it badly, maybe a couple of pages before it jammed. Now it can't even pick up a page, though I do see it has tried because it leaves a smudge on the top page. Another piece of equipment to throw away.

The reason why I'm going to all this trouble is because Thales died. Now that Angela is the primary TGD-INC server, and with Nimbda and heavy server loads taking it down every 24-48 hours (if I don't cycle the server applications), I'd like to install Mac OS X 10.1 on Angela and use that. Ok, forget whether or not I'm technically capable of setting up Mac OS X with Apache and named and Sendmail (or some other, more secure mail program). The problem is that I lose my printer and my scanner. The printer I lose because Epson still doesn't have a driver for Mac OS X for the Stylus Color 850. They did finally announce a bunch of drivers that they're going to release now that 10.1 is out, but the 850 isn't on that list. Not only that, no network printer is on the list -- bummer.

But since I'm going to let Mom use the 850 that doesn't matter as much. I can print from work or if I'd gotten the LaserWriter working I could have used that. But the LaserWriter needs AppleTalk which requires an older System which means another computer would need to act as a print server which means that Alicia becomes the candidate. As for the SCSI scanner, once again there are no plans for a Mac OS X driver for it, though in this case there is a nice shareware program that works with Mac OS X and many scanners. So that's less of a problem. Even if I don't need Alicia for the hardware, it'd still be nice to have a backup computer in case Jennifer dies. I don't have the money to just buy a new computer which was my old "server backup plan".

This is also a good time to standardize some of the web sites. Once Jennifer is running Apache and I have my web sites running well on it it'd be nice to backup my sites on Thales (and it'd be nice to backup Dave's sites on Jennifer). A proper named server that can act as a secondary server would also be nice, since we're supposed to backup chaosium.com. I'm on a budget here and I can't afford QuickDNS Pro for Mac OS 9.