From: Karl Hiramoto <karl@zoop.org>
for the last few years. I've been running a 486SX-25 with 8M RAM and 100M HD here at my work as a print server. I rescued the box from a pile of garbage. I'm running slackware 3.6 with a 2.0.39 kernel though. Just setup samba and lpd to do the printing. The machine has excellent reliability.
These old boxes work fine for print servers, routers, firewalls,
Old machines work great to for automation of real world things. Set a voltage, read a voltage, set bit, clear bit control applications.
You're my kind of guy. This would maybe be better as a reply to someone else, but I'de rather talk to someone who doesn't think 12Mb of RAM is too small to bother with. To those thinking of upgrading old hardware to a newer RedHat: Although I can't find any documentation of the fact anywhere, (the 'hardware requirements' section of the manual talks about disk space but not RAM), I know from hard experience that RH9.0 flatly refuses to install on 32MB and works only after giving you some backtalk on 64MB. It says something like "You lamer, if you won't give me a better machine, I'm going to turn on swapping bfore installing a boot sector, and trash anything you might have had on this disk. Then maybe I'll reboot". Why can't kids these days copy a 12K file in less than 16M? I don't know, but suspect that it has to do with making the install process "easier" by sending a human wave at it. Now nobody can say Overwrite partition table (y/n)? without first installing the X window, GtK, CORBA, Qt, Python, and Perl. -- Keith