Hot metal

My wife came back from IT club with an old Lenovo ThinkCentre. I'm going to erase the old version of Windows on it and install Debian Linux instead. We'll then install it in the cupboard at the IT club next to the NAS drive. I'll configure a VPN between this PC and another Linux system in the cloud, and the two Linux system will act as a proxy allowing people to access the NAS drive from home.

The current NAS drive doesn't come with a VPN client built in or one available - and while it's possible to side load one, I think this relay/proxy solution is simpler. During the week, I've been looking at the firewall rules I'll need to configure on this system to make it act as a transparent proxy for the SMB share on the NAS drive, and I already now how to build and configure a personal VPN on Linux - which is actually trivially simple.

I put the ThinkCentre in my office and the first thing I did was open it open to see how dusty it is - it wasn't and check on what's in the box. It doesn't have the maximum RAM it could take, but for what I plan to do with it that's okay. The hard drive is 500 GiB, which is more than enough for what I need - Debian will run in less than 20 GiB if you are careful. There are parallel and serial ports installed (we don't need either) and they block access to the PCIe ports - which we don't need at the moment - but could be used to install a M.2 SSD. For an 11 year old box it's perfectly neat and tidy and amazingly clean on the inside. Mind you it's hardly been used, the SMART report for the hard disk reports only a few thousand hours of run time and it's only been run 400 times in 11 years!

Today's blip is a large passive heat sink on the motherboard. The CPU is under a large heat sink and fan arrangement so not photogenic at all, this shiny block of aluminium is the principle chip on the motherboard that isn't incorporated into the CPU. On older systems there was a northbridge and a southbridge chip, but the northebridge is now almost always included in the CPU and the modern southbridge has partially been merged into the CPU too. This is old enough and simple enough that it may be the northbridge, but I'm not sure... As you can see no dust - which is amazing...