[geeks] Amusements for the time-shifted

[Sheldon T. Hall]

Before we came back from France, I decided to reduce my collection of old
Sun and SGI machines, and I've found homes for most of them.  It's a
bitter-sweet experience, fixing up one of youy old machines, just to pass it
along to another enthusiast.

All of this stuff has been sleeping peacefully for at least two years, and a
lot has changed in that time.  Websites come and go, new versions of
software introduce changes, and, most importantly, I'm not trying to
recreate the network I had two years ago, I'm just getting machine running
so I can move them from the "untested" stack to the "tested" one.

Some amusement can be had, though, from watching the screens and logs as ...

A machine who used to be part of a cluster comes up in isolation and
inquires about its missing friends.

Machines who used to netboot from the DHCP server on the main fileserver now
try to netboot from the DHCP server in the DSL "modem."

Cron jobs try to update now-nonexistant NFS shares with the contents of
now-nonexistant FTP sites.

... speaking of the last ... completewhois.com seems to have become one with
the dust of history.  I used to use their file of IP addresses by country to
update various firewalls, mailservers, etc.  Who has replaced them?  I'm
looking for a list of IP ranges with some indication of the country to which
they are assigned.  Format isn't too important, but being able to get it as
a single file, using wget, is.

Any suggestons?

-Shel