"Chuck Homic" <chuck@vvisions.com> wrote:
[...] Currently it is an excuse to own the domain underpowered.net.
Hah, great name!
[...] - How can I get on this list? That sounds cool.
Info is at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/survpc/ . Be forewarned however: It's an often contentious place, with a few hard-core DOS holdouts. Not all that it could be, but success stories for using "old stuff" are always welcome.
- 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.
That's why I wound up on Debian, although with a *bit* more disk space!
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. ;)
Great to hear that it keeps up with all that. A few folks on the list have asked about using various distributions on limited hardware, and I've generally recommended Debian as worth considering. I've installed it on 486en, but usually with 32M or more memory. I wasn't sure about less being practical (recogizing practical depends on the individual).
- 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.
Are you using dpkg or apt?
- 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.
I did notice that old NE2000 clone NICs caused my CPU utilization to spike, especially ISA versions. My 486-66 did fine with PCI cards, though that was a couple of kernels ago.
- 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!
Hmm. If I didn't toss 'em before the big move, I might actually HAVE some 4M 30 pin SIMMs. I think I'm out of 72 pin though. I get sad thinking about what I had to toss in Phoenix due to no time prior to my move. I did give away a couple of trunkloads of old stuff.
[...] - 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?
Yeah, I finally started consolidating boxes. A real problem in Phoenix was heat, where my "den" easily ran 10 degrees hotter than the rest of the house. 'Course, here that's not quite the issue it was. Still, I don't like waste, and the quiet hum of my current systems is much nicer than the roar of fans I had (as well as the AC working overtime to keep up.)
(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.)
I wanted to do the same thing! Quiet, low power, and UPS built-in. Oh, and small too. Thanks for the info! - Bob