Recycling old PC's/Company Upgrading.
1). Please (Pretty Please!) change the 'subject' when changing, well, the subject. 2). Re erasing old disks - this is a particularly difficult one as who knows what levels you really have to go to. Some companies make lots of money providing tools/service to do this. Why not suggest that the machines are provided ex-harddisk, who ever collects them simply takes a screwdriver and removes the disks before taking the machines away. 3). Another problem is the 'safety', you may need to sign a waiver stating that the company can not be held responsible if the kit is electrically unsafe. Simon Wood
-----Original Message----- From: Nigel Metheringham [SMTP:Nigel.Metheringham@VData.co.uk] Sent: Thursday, September 21, 2000 5:28 PM To: kevin.taylor@powerconv.alstom.com Cc: Schools List Subject: Re: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Letter to local schools.
kevin.taylor@powerconv.alstom.com said:
Someone at my last LUG meeting suggesting raiding skips for thrown out boxes, popping Linux on them, and giving them out to LUG members for experiments (a bit extreme, but I am sure something could come of it).
Serious point would be to talk to a reasonable sized company that has been around for a few years so is likely to be rolling out old kit with the latest PIV you now need to boot W2K in less than 2 days.... if the kit was going to a good cause and you could guarentee that any data on the systems was entirely wiped I'm sure they could see it as a way of getting cheap publicity.
Nigel.
-- [ - Opinions expressed are personal and may not be shared by VData - ] [ Nigel Metheringham Nigel.Metheringham@VData.co.uk ] [ Phone: +44 1423 850000 Fax +44 1423 858866 ]
On Fri, 22 Sep 2000, you wrote:
1). Please (Pretty Please!) change the 'subject' when changing, well, the subject.
You may have to use 'Send' rather than 'Reply' as well, for those using mail clients which support message threading. Version 1.0.29.2 of kmail doesn't BTW, but I am hoping that the version in kde2 does.
2). Re erasing old disks - this is a particularly difficult one as who knows what levels you really have to go to. Some companies make lots of money providing tools/service to do this. Why not suggest that the machines are provided ex-harddisk, who ever collects them simply takes a screwdriver and removes the disks before taking the machines away.
You have to write data to every sector on the drive, i.e. have a looping program which just writes 0xFF to /dev/hd* until the end of the disks are reached. Not quite as simple as it sounds, as some sectors may have write errors, so the program must ignore these are carry on. I'm sure that there is some PD software to do this, which will fit on a bootable floppy. Main problem with this is that old drives are *slow* so that process can take ages (1 hour per drive or more). Good news is that you can use software RAID to glue them all together to produce a more useful size and performance.
3). Another problem is the 'safety', you may need to sign a waiver stating that the company can not be held responsible if the kit is electrically unsafe.
An ex-employer used to give us their old PC's, but because of a court case against them they had to be put into a skip. We removed them from there, which is actually stealing. This did save them a lot of money, as about 250 pcs with monitors fitted into 1 skip, so they switched off the security cameras while the stealing was taking place. I think that their current policy is to have old pcs crushed :( For this reason PCs are often 'donated' anonymously, purely because it saves money, and they would not want any publicity if it could be helped, in case any of their shareholders are legal experts. Another angle may be to study the eco-angle (there is a relevant howto), then get your local environmental pressure group to do all the collecting etc. for you. Clive, who not so long ago had a house full of dirty Wyse terminals ;)
Simon Wood
participants (2)
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Clive Jones -
Simon Wood