Re: Peices n parts questions

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.

It would help if you could scrounge a scsi card and a couple of scsi
drives. They don't need to be fast or new of course, but they'd help
because the main cpu wouldn't have to work as hard doing disk I/O. You
could still boot off the IDE drive if you needed to.

> 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).

With so little ram I'd recommend against the gui if possible. The ram the
gui doesn't use up will go to file buffering and help disk I/O.

FTP is fine, but if you start loading it down with apache, php, mysql,
etc. it'll be a real dog. If performance isn't an issue, then go for it,
but your mention of gigabit nics implies that adequate performance is at
least a concern.

Firewall stuff is very lightweight, so that shouldn't be any big deal.

> 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?

I wouldn't even bother with firewire or gig ethernet. That system
probably would have a hard time saturating a 100 meg pipe. I would get a
good 100 meg nic that can offload as much of the network processing as
possible from the main cpu, along the same lines as my scsi recommendation
above. Good nics might be 3com 3c905, and nics using Intel chipsets. I'm
sure others would have better recommendations.

In my experience, the key to satisfaction with slow hardware is to make
such boxes single-taskers. If it must be a multitasker, then make the
tasks lightweight.

Mike
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Received on Tue Nov 13 12:07:00 2007