An eBay watch notice arrived for a pair of Intel Xeon processors on January 5.
The listing offered two 3.06 GHz processors with one megabyte of cache. The message only says I was watching the auction. It does not say I placed a bid or bought the processors.
The listing fits the hardware trail around my work at the time. I was the network administrator at SimAuthor, where I supported Windows and Linux systems, databases, engineering labs, and production services. I was also running Praxis Technology and doing systems and network consulting outside the main job.
I had been buying components and building systems to learn from for years. Used server hardware made it possible to work with multi-processor machines, storage, virtualization, operating systems, and network services without waiting for an employer project. It also came with more risk than a supported company purchase.
That risk was visible in the same mailbox. A few months earlier I had finished a long return involving two Western Digital Raptor drives. One drive arrived dead, and its replacement also failed. The seller eventually refunded the purchase. A low price was only useful after the component passed testing.
The Xeon notice does not identify a target motherboard, chassis, or application. I cannot say whether the pair was intended for my home rack, a Praxis project, or simple price research. I also cannot reconstruct the final auction result from this message alone.
The useful fact is narrower. At the beginning of 2006, while managing production systems during the day, I was still watching the used market for server components. A pair of processors could become a lab machine, a virtualization host, or nothing at all depending on the price and compatible parts.
The auction was one item in a much larger informal equipment list. I kept reading listings, comparing specifications, and testing whatever hardware actually arrived.