What to do with an old box?

Tii · l33t Joined: 02 Jan 2004 Posts: 733

I'm wondering what I could do with a box that has a P2 266 MHz and 128M memory. It can be a server of some kind but I'm not sure what it can handle. How much more could I do with a 500MHz AMD K6-2 and 256MB?

andrewy · l33t Joined: 07 Apr 2004 Posts: 602

It would make a fine firewall/router..

psycho_seba · n00b Joined: 17 Dec 2003 Posts: 64 Location: Argentina

You can build a very decent X terminal using XDMCP (http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/XDMCP-HOWTO/index.html). I am about to [try to] build one with an old 486.

FenixRF · n00b Joined: 01 Jun 2004 Posts: 7 Location: Toronto, CA

If it were a laptop you could make yourself a very fine active picture frame showing off your photos... if you're like me you don't have any

Otherwise, both would make great front-end firewall/routers and even a web server.

You could also use it as a streaming server for MP3's no?

My two cents... with inflation, I don't know how much I owe.

FenixRF
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davidblewett · Posted: Mon Jun 07, 2004 4:40 pm Post subject:

I"m using a very similar system, but with less memory. It is the gateway/router/firewall for my home network. It is running Courier-MTA, DNSMasq, Squid, sshd, shorewall, tftp-hpa, NFS, Samba, and CUPS. Everything works great, just took awhile to get everything configured.
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ynef · n00b Joined: 14 Jan 2004 Posts: 69 Location: Lund, Sweden

That system is fine for everything you might want to do with it, except maybe play flash games online...

I'd install OpenBSD on it and turn it into a firewall/router and use apache on it to serve the rest of the world those songs of you singing in the shower, that you recorded yourself, that you might have on the harddrive...

kezzla · Posted: Mon Jun 07, 2004 10:07 pm Post subject:

Perhaps throw that POS in the garbage ?
Yes...Anything less than a GHz is a felony.

the_y_man · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 25 Jan 2004 Posts: 80

i use a similar low end p2 233 mhz machine, stuck 198 mb ram and a 40 gig hard drive.
I have couple of things running on it:

samba
apache
proftpd
ssh
torrentflux (bittorrent web front-end)
kplaylist (mp3 streaming and database).

And it's all running perfectly well (it's been up for over a month now).

I want to install more stuff on it. Anybody got any ideas?

Krakatoa · n00b Joined: 29 Dec 2003 Posts: 30

I've got an old PII 266 that I turned into a wireless router with a wired nic and a wireless pci card. I downloaded a copy of Linux LiveCD Router www.wifi.com.ar/english. It's a bootable iso image suitable for burning that includes auto detection of wifi chipsets, prism 2 in my case, shorewall, wavemon and lots of other useful tools. The main advantage of the live cd is that you can try out different linux/bsd distros to tweek, beat on, curse at and learn, but always have the option of using it as a wireless router/firewall. There is no x-windows and its based on Slackware. Naturally, you don't even need a monitor, keyboard or mouse to administor it.
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