Bob raised a lotta threads; this one struck me first. Since platforms are being thrown away or available so cheap, why would you risk a Linux platform from being damaged by lightning or whatever on the 56k modem line? That modem is the only thing between the power grid and the telco wires, and you never know if your surge protection is good enough.
Another thing about the 486, is that if what you want to do, is put up a system online 24/7, you want it to use as little electricity as possible so as to maximize the battery backup time. I have run a 486 dx 100 with 8 megs dram on 18-20 watts from an ordinary car battery. There are some laptop power supplies on the gray/surplus market for 13$ that take 12vdc input, and output the standard ISA P-8,P-9 jack (+5/12, -5/12vdc) that can be just soldered from the PS to the power jacks. The 5vdc line is good for about 5a, but you could prolly get 8a if you screwed on a large heatsink. There are some AT/ATX motherboards out there with socket 7 and 72 pin dram that you could run Linux on, that could run off one of these laptop power supplies. But now the wattage runs 30-50 watts. But did I understand correctly that what he had in mind was a BBS on the 486 cabled to a Linux ISP or high speed terminal? Sounds kewl. I am in email with another guy in the Ozarks, both of us swamped by MS spam. Looks like our local isp server has gotten infected and is generating 100 + fake MS patches every day. Both of us think lots of mail is bouncing because of the spam clogging the local servers. There are only 3 ISP outfits in this rural area, all of which run win xp and MS-CHAP. I have seen some other threads and websites nosing around about an alternative email network, like the old BBS nets, where there were no anonymous sources that could clog the bandwidth. The more spam there is, the more we need high speed bandwidth, the more they make, the more we havta buy. Enuf already. But somewhere on my, or your, local grid, there hasta be a machine to logon to with dos, that can give you your email, and nothing but *your* email, as matched with a list of sources which you select, and then offer to transfer you to the net for anonymous surfing thru the Linux server. Which can generate fake id to the sites trying to collect cookies on you and me. To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
