[AusNOG] Sad retirement day...

[Ross Wheeler]

On Wed, 13 Jan 2016, Mark Smith wrote:

> An interesting question would be when would it have become cheaper to
> replace it just on the power savings alone.

In the last 7 years, it's run entirely off renewable energy, so "cost of 
power" has been basically zero.

But it's still a valid point. It was never a particularly hungry beast - I 
couldn't have run say, a DL-380 here because of the power it would have 
consumed - but this box (no kb, no monitor) took (from memory) under 50W

> I bought one of these a few years ago for around $60 just to play with
> after loading up OpenWRT on it (and haven't actually really done anything
> with it.)

I've got a bunch (30 or 40 or so) WRG54GL devices reflashed to openWRT, 
running all over the country doing all sorts of things. They're remarkably 
robust, but lack several things I specifically needed on this old box.

> It was only after buying it did I realise it had a more powerful CPU, more
> RAM, more storage and ran on far less power than the first computer I ever
> bought - a 80486 for around $4k in somewhere around 1990.

It's amazing. I look at some of the tiny little PIC chips I embed in 
things. Not much more than 5mm x 3mm, run on a milliwatt or so, with 
processor speeds around 80MHz, and including a bunch of IO and A/D 
channels... and cost about $2 each!

R.