This weekend marked the end of a long era, and the beginning of another, presumably shorter one.

First, I finally decommissioned wintermute, the old Sony VAIO PCV-90 that’s been running OpenBSD and serving as my home network’s firewall for the last five years or so. wintermute has been in more-or-less continuous operation since I bought it, the first PC I owned, from CompUSA in Rockville, MD back in 1996. wintermute served me well for many years, including occasional car trips to visit my first geek crush for Linux hacking sessions and twinkies. After I moved on to greener pastures (boromir, I think), wintermute was handed down to my siblings, who used it until I took it back for use as my firewall.

It’s quite remarkable that it has the original mobo, RAM, processor, power supply, and network card. The hard drive was long ago replaced, and the CD-ROM stopped working somewhere around 2000, but the machine itself has been solid.

This past weekend I upgraded my home firewall, wintermute, and one of my internal servers, aragorn, to OpenBSD 4.2. aragorn was running 4.1, and wintermute was kicking ass on 3.6!

wintermute is the first computer I ever owned; a Sony VAIO PCV-90. It’s a 90MHz Pentium with 64MB of RAM and an (upgraded) 3600 RPM 8GB PATA drive. aragorn is an ancient PowerEdge 1300 I bought for a contract many years ago; it’s a two-way Pentium II 400MHz box with something like 128MB of RAM and a couple of SCSI disks.