Re: Peices n parts questions

From: Arthur Corliss <acorliss@nevaeh-linux.org>
Date: Tue Nov 13 2007 - 12:04:25 AKST

On Mon, 12 Nov 2007, Kurt Brendgard wrote:

> OK, you're all gonna think I'm off my rocker for this
> one, but it's all I got to work with.
>
> I was given an old Acer desktop that I've decided to
> try and turn into a fileserver because I desperatly
> need one. It's about maxed out with 256 megs of RAM,
> an AMD K6-2 266 MHZ, and a 2 gig HD. I've already
> pulled out the modem, and I think the sound is turned
> off. I want to add a firewire card for an external
> case because the BIOS on this thing doesn't like
> anything bigger than a 2 gig HD. I need something a
> lot bigger. I also want to add a gigabit network
> adapter if I can find one that will work with it.

Don't waste time on the Gb NIC. With that processor there's no way it would
be able to handle the interrupts of a maxed-out full duplex 100Mbps NIC,
especially after you add application processing, firewalling, etc. On a
machine that old, you can use USB or 1394 PCI cards, but you need to make
sure they support the older bus rates (I think the original spec is 33MHz),
an odds are it's also a 5V bus, rather than the newer 3.3V. You may need to
find a used parts store for a card matching that, though.

> What is absolutely essenstial is getting Samba set up,
> and a GUI for when I need it. What would be extremely
> nice to have is FTP as well. If I can use it with
> Apache, PHP, MySQL, and phpMyAdmin, it would be nice,
> but not essential. This is going to be behind at least
> one firewall, possibly more. It's a trusted network, I
> don't need a whole lot of security on this one other
> than a password to keep out people who sit down at the
> keyboard(and there will be few if any of them).

Why the need for a GUI? I've got some real old X thin clients that can run
with 32MB, but you're talking a no frills environment. If you just need
xterms and/or gvim, that would be feasible. Anything more, and you're going
to end up swapping applications to swap (after you add in all the other
items).

Running Samba is very doable, but unless you actually have a managed
domain you'd be well advised to compile your own version that takes
out all the optional stuff (LDAP, Kerberos, etc.).

Apache + PHP is similarly doable if it's strictly for occasional use (for
administration or testing), the rest of the time it'll be mostly paged out
to swap, so your other services won't suffer much. MySQL, though, I
wouldn't add to that mix unless you down-rev to a smaller version like 3.x.

Finally, if you're going to run a current distribution, find the smallest
one you can and disable everything. Don't even run udev if you can avoid
it. If you do all that, you can still get a lot of mileage out of that
hardware.

> Has anybody any experience with these older systems
> and firewire adapters and gigabit ethernet adpters?
> Any that you might want to suggest, or suggest I stay
> away from? Any particular flavor or version you might
> suggest for something this old and what I want to do
> with it? Any helpful sites?
>
> Yea, I could sit down and research it out but I
> thought why re invent the wheel if somebody has some
> helpful insite/experience that could shave some time
> off my project.

Hope this helps.

         --Arthur Corliss
           Live Free or Die
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Received on Tue Nov 13 12:04:39 2007

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