The NeXtStations find a home.

So the NeXTstations that I got when I was in college are now safely located in the rack I just purchased (the transport of which is worthy of its own post). They aren't particularly glamerous in any way but they do fit in the rack rather nicely. Interestingly enough 7 was the number I decided to carry home, and seven is the number that fits between the rails perfectly.

As you can see I'm not particularly good with the RJ-45 crimper yet (so the cables have a tendency to get shorter when making them).

I don't know how well you can see from the picture but the NeXTstation when not attached to a monitor requires a 450-470 ohm load between pins 6 and 19 of the DB19 (yes, a DB19... good luck finding a mating connector). I have actually found DB19 soldercup plugs fairly reasonably priced (50 cents a pop) so I'll be ordering some of those to make the resistor load a bit more secure.

As for the future plans of this cluster I know I can get them to netboot netBSD without an issue (did that in college, and even installed the netBSD clustering suite to play around with), but I'm thinking about actually getting them to netboot copies of NeXTstep 3.3. Remember the very first webserver by Tim Berners-Lee while he was at CERN runs on NeXTstep.