Doing a lot with a little [LWN.net]

Doing a lot with a little

Posted Feb 9, 2004 6:05 UTC (Mon) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216)
In reply to: Stable kernel 2.0.40 released by rknop
Parent article: Stable kernel 2.0.40 released

I used to serve a whole office (back in 1995 or so) from a 386SX/16 box with 8M of RAM, running Netatalk (Mac filesharing), mail (SMTP/POP3 to/from 10 clients, UUCP to/from to smarthost over a 9600 bps dialup every three hours) and small intranet web server (Apache). That blessed thing was a faster Mac fileserver than my Power Mac 8500/120. And it ran on kernel 1.2.13 until the last three months when I upgraded it to 1.3.57. :-) It did, however, require almost 2.5 hours to recompile the kernel. :-(

Just to say you can do a lot with Linux (Slackware 3.0 in this case) and a just a dab of memory... :-)

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Doing a lot with a little

Posted Feb 9, 2004 6:13 UTC (Mon) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

Oh, and one more thing... that box would still be running today and plugging along just fine if somebody hadn't gone and knocked over a water bottle into its innards. (No, it wasn't me.) :-)

I understand the desire to have the latest stuff, and that's all well and good, but the needs of this particular office were such that you could have left that thing running to this day and they would have been fine. So I can see why someone would still want to use the 2.0.40 kernel, especially if there were incompatible changes made in forward versions or support for old devices (necessary for certain hardware) was dropped.