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?