Mottainai is a Japanese term which roughly translates to a sense of regret or shame in throwing old objects away. Old objects (historically 100 years old) may gain spirits (Tsukumogami) and be even more wasteful to throw away. Much of my old hardware gives me these feelings.
Thus we return to my AlphaServer 1000A 5/400, which dropped not only a disk from its RAID5 years ago when I started this post, but also the spare it was going to rebuild on. Luckily I had a spare drive, and still had written notes on how to perform the (offline) component restore, and was able to move home directories to more recent hardware to lessen the stress on the array. It has been holding without losing more disk for over two years. (The uptime typically reflected long term power outages more than hardware issues.)
I dragged out the process of moving everything off the Alpha and retiring it permanently, since it still seems somehow disrespectful. It’s a huge (8U) box, eats up loads of power (250W idle), and is easily bested compute-wise by my decades-old x86 hardware. Apparently the 1000A was also not well-known for reliability, but somehow mine has worn the ages well. It was the main academic server for many years at my alma mater, and ran my primary domin services for roughly two decades after that.
I could probably have taken the disk array offline to save half the power, and for a period I was seriously examining what it would take to install a PCI SATA controller with an external disk tray. This, of course, never happened.
Tonight I migrated the last service off of it (NIS) and it has been powered down. It’s a little quieter, and I am a little sad. Alpha never got what it deserved, buried under double-acquisition over a failed bet. (IA64)
If nothing is completely broken by its offline-ness, it’s only a matter of time until it is evicted from my basement. This is perhaps the event that hurts the most; even though I cannot justify the space taken up by inanimate obsolete computers, I feel like they deserve space in a shrine of some sort, not disassembly.