On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 08:31:25AM -0400, Bob George wrote:
"Chuck Homic" <chuck@vvisions.com> wrote:
Oh, hey... my Debian rant reminded me of something!
I have Debian running on a 486-25 with 12MB of RAM. [...]
Hey, mind if I ask what you use it for? The reason I ask is that I'm on a list dedicated to old PC hardware users, which until recently equated to a base of fanatical DOS holdouts. Slowly though, most are inquiring about Linux, so I'd like to give them some useful info about using Debian as a "modern" distribution on low-resource systems. Unfortunately, I've had to dump most of my old systems, so can't speak from first-hand experience anymore.
Currently it is an excuse to own the domain underpowered.net. It doesn't do much right now, due to lack of storage. My 5G SCSI drive doesn't work with my old old Future Domain controller, so it's running 240M right now. I bought a new interface (urrm... new to me, for a 16-bit ISA SCSI adapter. $1 at eBay, woohoo) and have yet to see if it works better. Anyway, I mostly use it for file transfer, right now. Like if I'm at work and want to send a large file home, I'll drop it there. Or if I want to email friends/family digital photos, but no mail server I know of will accept a 50M attachment, I send a link to http://underpowered.net/whatever In the future I plan to put some of my hackish projects there, expecting that the low bandwidth needs of such things will match the low power available. And of course it runs primary DNS for underpowered.net.
Stephen Darnold, the guy who put Basic Linux together, used to lurk there, and there was often extensive discussion on what could be run on older hardware. Yours sounds like the lower end of the spectrum, so I'm wondering how well it works. Would it work well with Debian specifically as a firewall/gateway? Would you say the benefits of running something current offsets the inconvenience of those delays with installs etc.?
Whoa, this is like, an interview or something. Let's take it 1-by-1: - How can I get on this list? That sounds cool. - I chose Debian for three reasons. 1. familiarity, 2. laziness, 3. the aforementioned 240M hard drive. Since Debian would install a working base system in around 50M, I figured it could conserve well. Currently I'm running DNS, HTTP, FTP, & IMAP with ~100M free for data. I have to erase the HTTP logs of virus attacks on a fairly regular basis to keep that free space, though. ;) - In retrospect, it would be nice to have a package manager with more modest RAM requirements. However, I'll decide this for real when I install the second hard drive. With one HD just for swap, it might not matter so much. - I have no problem saturating my 10Mbit ethernet with a 486-25, so I'm sure it would make a fine firewall/gateway if you don't use it for anything else, and you might have to go easy on the firewall rules. Or it might do fine with fancy firewall rules, who knows? Experience running NAT (for a T1) on similar hardware indicates that that would be no problem. - Although installing packages is a pain (which would be fixed up for $0.50 of RAM, I presume) it just hums along in the interim. I don't know how much RAM the motherboard can take, and I wouldn't know who to buy 30/72-pin SIMMs from. :) Although experience shows I wouldn't have to buy them, they would be given to me if I express interest. (That's a big bonus for old hardware! That's how I got my 5M SCSI drive... it's one of those big full-height Seagate bricks, and fits in no modern case known to man.) - It's a good box just to have hooked up to a wire, but if you have such a thing and you ever find yourself thinking about adding a second 486 to boost resources, you've gone off the deep end. After the novelty value subsides, you have to think about the energy cost. How many services can you provide per watt? How would that compare to a 50W power supply on an old P-100 thinkpad or something? (I'd often thought about using aging laptops as servers, to simplify the UPS situation. I figure a ~$40 car battery plugged into the AC jack could provide backup power for quite a long time, but that's just insanity.) Well, enough rambling. Work to do. -Chuck BTW, speaking of old hardware... some folks on the list might remember my '87 Plymouth Sundance. My brother put in a new engine, and it now runs like da shiznit, and is approaching 210,000 miles. You don't get free parts for a 15 year old car like a 15 year old computer, but there are other advantages.