Zbigniew Baniewski wrote:
On Fri, Feb 01, 2008 at 08:16:49PM +0200, Imre Oolberg wrote:
As an operating system my first choice would OpenBSD and second is Linux.
In fact at the moment i run such a kind of setup using Linux but i feel
need to upgrade my hardware, i have old 700 MHz Celeron, 19" monitor
(1024x768) and 100MBit/s network.
I would be very thankful if somebody could share their experience about
putting together such a kind of computer or what do you recommend.
You can use old Pentium II 400 MHz - there are still many of them available,
which doesn't need any cooler, its radiator will do. Such way the only
moving part would be PS-fan, which you can slow down a little, using
a resistor 50-100 Ohm - additionally reducing a noise.
"Full" Pentium II with 400 MHz clock will give you in practice about as much
power, as that Celeron 700 (a little less, but not that much).
I have this setup exactly. I put a resistor on the fan in the PS and the
machine is virtually inaudible. And the last time I checked, it consumes
less than 20W. It has 64MB RAM, a DVI graphics card and an em NIC that
is connected via a cross-over cable to my main server in the next room,
which I cannot hear. The 400MHz machine boots an extremely minimal
FreeBSD system via PXE, runs X, and connects to the main server via XDM.
400MHz for this machine is over-kill actually. I have used an old P166
that works just as well, but for some reason my DVI card doesn't work in it.
Because of the way X operates, all the applications run run on my main
server. The main server is s a dual P3 1GHz with 2GB RAM and a 4 SCSI
disk RAID0 running OpenBSD. I have been using this setup for almost 3
years now.
