On 05/15/11 12:48, Michael Sioutis wrote: > Hello, > > I ressurected an old pc yesterday (specs on title) with OpenBSD 4.9 > and without X to keep it light. It > runs ridiculously well! Everything works fine except the automatic > powerdown (shutdown -hp now), which > is not supported aparently by the mobo, anyway, don't care about that. > > I currently have sshd, pf, sshguard and sendmail running, all in 4-5 > MB of 18-21 available RAM (the rest is taken > by the hardware I suppose) and 1-2 MB of 42 MB swap. > > I could turn it into a firewall, but I allready have one, and I am not > very excited about the idea. > What I do find exciting is teaching my nephew some computer/programming > basics. > Anyone find it a good idea?
yeah, please teach the young'uns some computer basics. They sure as heck aren't getting it in the schools. What passes for "computer education" in schools today is a joke. (I'm sorry, I do not consider learning a small number of APPLICATIONS true "computer" education.) Take the machine apart, have him build it back up (with your help, but hold your hands behind your back, so HE has to do the work), understand what all the pieces do, google for the part numbers of the various parts on the main board and get some idea what they do. Show him how when sitting at a BIOS screen or at a DOS prompt, the CPU gets very hot, while when running a modern OS (like OpenBSD), the CPU will be cool to the touch when the system is idle, but will quickly heat up when the CPU gets busy. You can run a P166 without a heatsink for extended periods of time, 'specially with a low-power-when-idle OS like OpenBSD. One thing I've been meaning to do but have not got around to yet in a permanent way is taking a fluid tube from a burned-out bubble light (google for it, if you don't know what I mean, the wikipedia article is pretty accurate) and bonding it to a P1 CPU. I suspect a P1 would be "about right" in terms of delivering heat to the tube -- a Celeron 400 was a bit much, though worked, a Celeron 566 got too hot too quickly, bubbling ferociously for a short time, but the CPU would quickly overheat and lock. With a P1, probably no or few bubbles at idle, could get a pretty good bubbling going while building a kernel. :) > I have allready installed python and gprolog, which I like for basic > aritmhetics stuff. > > What dissapoints me the most, is that there don't exist USB ports and > they might not even be supported, the pc > is from 1998. > I could use rtorrent with screen to download stuff to an external hard drive.. > But I will check on that when I find the time to open the case. Regarding USB ports -- if you find an old USB 1.0 card laying around, I bet it would work fine. USB2.0 cards...you might find the card expects a newer version of the PCI bus than your machine has...but you may get lucky or I may be completely wrong. :) Biggest problem with putting "big" disks in old machines is memory (RAM+Swap) required for fsck. You can probably get some more memory for your machine, but maybe not enough cheaply to put much more than a 40G disk in it. I have found a lot of P166 machine could be "overclocked" to 200MHz. I don't recall any 166MHz P1 procs that couldn't tolerate 200MHz, seemingly indefinitely. I ran one like this as my primary web and mail server for myself and a number of friends for YEARS, then later as just a firewall. I believe its total production life in my use was probably somewhere around 6 years. > What else could I use it for? These make great machines for hostile environments. Rather than a CPU fan on a heatsink, they work great with a large heatsink and some active air movement nearby. In fact, once OpenBSD is booted, under usual production, the heatsink will be COOL to the touch. For this reason, they run great in dusty or filthy environments that would kill most modern machines in months or weeks (the above mentioned machine was in an auto service station the entire six years). That machine will do everything most people need as a firewall or mail/webserver for small traffic, low bandwidth connections (i.e., what most people have). The primary reason I upgraded (to a PII-450) is the ssh connect times are faster, and the UDMA support on the newer machines is better, so I can move files around locally a lot faster (though remotely, no significant difference) some other things you could do with a machine like that: * Local DNS resolver * terminal server (one of my terminal servers is a P90) * test-install machines for experimentation * mini-FTP/SFTP/SCP servers for file distribution * Machine for doing things that might expose yourself to a security issue, keep it contained to a non-critical system. Nick.
