I bought a Dell Optiplex (small form factor corporate desktop) with a Pentium 3 733 MHz for $40 (from a friend, no RAM or HDD).
I loaded it with an old 128 meg RAM stick I had lying around, and bought a 200 gig hard disc for it. Total cost <$200, and it is a very respectable server. I use it mostly for file/music/backup storage at home over NFS (because my main computer is a laptop with a small HDD), and also as a web server. Runs Debian Sarge (quite a minimal install). The computer was cheaper than a USB/Firewire enclosure for the hard drive. I thoroughly recommend the Dell Optiplex, because it is very compact and virtually silent, and uses about 90 watts of power at full load. They can be had from Trade Me for under a hundred dollars including RAM and HDD. On Wed, 2005-08-17 at 15:06 +1200, Nick Rout wrote: > On Wed, 17 Aug 2005 14:54:33 +1200 > yuri wrote: > > > It's time to teach myself a bit of PHP and MySQL. > > For $20 I can get a P166 with 64MB RAM and a few gigs of HD from Molten > > Media. > > My first project will be a little addressbook webapp (that's not too > > ambitious is it?) > > no that sounds acheivable, there should be plenty of howtos around. > > > > > What would be the minimum hardware requirement? Would the $20 box suffice? > > dicey i would have thought. I have a p233 here at the office with 64M > RAM which used to be my postfix|cyrus|apache|samba|anything else server > but it proved too slow to serve mailbxes with 10k massage folders, and > now sits around looking busy and just serving files via samba. It does > just that just fine. > > IMHO the machine you are looking at will just do what you want, but it > will be slow about it and you'll be wishing you spent $50. Something > nearer the 3-400M mark with 128M of RAM will "serve" you much better. > > > > Also, what distro would be installable on that, with Apache, MySQL and PHP. > > (No X11 required - it won't even have a screen attached). > > I would look at debian (or minimal ubuntu). (Actually i would compile a > minimal gentoo system on my desktop, than transfer it over and use > gentoo, but I am just perverse like that) > > > > > Yuri > > -- > > ** WARNING to mailing list repliers ** > > Gmail over-rides "Reply-To:" field. Check your "To:" address before > > sending reply to this post. >
