Silly question [LWN.net]

Silly question

Posted Feb 25, 2006 14:10 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: Silly question by foo-bar
Parent article: Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com)

But isn't it easier to buy a nice, fast and quite PC than to maintain all this ancient iron ??

At work I refurbished an old HP workstation (PA-RISC inside @ 200 MHz) and loaded Debian sarge to use it as a server. Yes, it may be old and slow, but the hardware is still up and running after 10 years -- it is now a rock solid cvs and web server with uptimes in excess of 300 days, and with a high geek factor.

Another possibility is to take that old PC and use it as a router, firewall or any other secondary role -- with a couple of network adapters and a switch, you may build a router far more robust than any commercial offerings, more configurable, and far cheaper. Even if you buy the shiny new system, don't discard the old one too fast.

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Silly question

Posted Feb 26, 2006 1:43 UTC (Sun) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link]

man_ls, it looks like you and I are part of the "Linux on everything" crowd. And that suits me just fine. I had to deal with HP hardware some years back. I knew Debian offered a port and would have loved to run Linux as opposed to HPUX. HPUX, though friendly, isn't my cup of tea.

Silly question

Posted Feb 26, 2006 10:56 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

To be honest, about two years ago I was looking for a web server, and the only machine available at the time was the 1997 vintage HP Visualize B180L workstation. Debian sarge (testing at the time) had a port for PA-RISC and was very well suited to the machine; I even loaded KDE 3.2 at some point and it ran fine on its 180 MHz processor, though later I removed it since I would be controlling the server using SSH.

I also tried this 1996 IBM RS/6000 43p-140 we had lying around; its interior was eerily similar to my old PowerMac 7500, no doubt because of their common PReP heritage. Sadly the hardware was much worse condition than the HP's (it made strange noises), and its firmware was horrible too. After booting several times from serial console or diskette I was fed up. In contrast, with the HP you just load the CD-ROM, started and installed, much like you do today.

To be even more honest, the geek factor of all this hardware was very high: rescuing these machines from the dump was a big satisfaction. Then I rescued an old PII @ 400 MHz to use as a custom made firewall/router using two network adapters and an old hub; and finally a retiring PIII @ 800 MHz to use as a Java workstation/server. All of them with Debian, of course; all headless except for this last one which had icewm. We then had the core of a corporate network at a total cost of 0 €; uptime in excess of 300 days, zero intrussions, and it has been running smoothly since I left a year ago, with minimal maintenance by a colleague. Linux on everything, yeah. How can we not love GNU/Linux?

Silly question

Posted Feb 26, 2006 20:18 UTC (Sun) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]

For routers one can buy things like an ASUS wL500G Deluxe and throw the OpenWRT distribution at it.
5 switched network ports, WLAN, a 200MHz processor, 32MB RAM and two USB2 ports for external storage, an ISDN adapter for VoIP and so on...

And all that for 90 Euro and maybe 5 Watts of electical power and of course no noise whatsoever. The power savings alone should account for the little investment over an old PC in a year or so.