5 Aug
2006
5 Aug
'06
11:12 a.m.
Roy J. Tellason wrote:
Speaking of big old clunky drives, I have a couple of
those around here that
I have no use for -- they're 5.25" FH, SCSI, and I'm told around a gig
each. There are some terminators and such on one that aren't on the other,
and of course the jumpering is different (but there _are_ jumpers). Anybody
interested in taking these off my hands? Please? Feel free to contact me
offlist...
If you have any dead ones, they are great if you teach computer
classes. You can take'em apart and passe'm around opened, since the
parts are quite big, it's easy to point them out. :-) Either that, or
um, hang'em on a wall as art? :-) That said, they do have some rather
interesting magnets inside of them.
Indeed. I am currently using (and sending this stuff
through) a 486dx2/66 for
a firewall/router. And when I get done with that one for whatever reason I
have plenty more similar hardware to "use up" before I move on to the
Pentium-class hardware, of which I also have plenty.
They do have plenty of CPU power to act as NAT/firewall routers, but if
you want to run ssh, you'll find them a bit on the slow side. The
500Mhz PIII I replaced my P1 with now also runs a squid proxy and an
adblocker as well. Soon as you rely on any encryption, especially if
any part of that does a public key exchange, 486's and P100's are very
very slow. Things like blowfish and RC40 work fine though.
The problem with storing old hardware though is that you'll have to
replace dead capacitors as they dry up, etc. You won't have problems
with 486's, but anything over 15 years old might have issues there.
Things over 20 years of age certainly.
A P-III is "an aging machine"? I guess
I'm still *way* behind the times,
then... The "workstation" I'm typing this on is a Celeron 366 (though I
have
a few faster boxes on hand that I really do need to get into the picture here
when I can stop *using* it long enough to do some upgrades :-) and the
"server" here is a K6-200...
Relatively to other hardware, yes. :-) Depends on what you want to do.
A low end machine can work just fine as a file server, DNS, DHCP,
router, firewall because those are I/O bound. So there's little
difference between a 486 and a PIII at DSL/cable modem speeds. Any more
and you'll need something a bit more beefy.
Got a couple of P-II boards around, but no P-III --
and isn't that the one
where they introduced the processor serial number?
I think so yeah, the bastards. At least they also gave us a random
number generator too.
I still don't intend to throw 'em out until
they're all used up. :-)
Yeah, I got a few old boxen here too. I need to figure out a use for
the old P100. I do have a 486 and a 386 somewhere in the closet too. I
think I have some ancient 8 port serial card somewhere that's ISA, or
perhaps I can use it with a catweasel as a data transfer machine with
5.25" floppies or such.