On Tue, 29 May 2012, Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> wrote:
(*) by fairly decent, i mean something equivalent to or better than a mid-1990s PC. you probably couldn't find something so primitive these days, and why bother when it's easy to find early-to-mid 2000s era PCs (i.e. up to 10 years newer than that) being given away for free.
even something like an old celeron CPU eeepc is pretty good for the job, except for the shortage of ethernet and expansion ports....but the ethernet shortage is easily solved by a cheap gigabit switch (and/or USB NICs) and the lack of expansion ports is no worse than (or considerably better than) most openwrt compatible devices.
My recollection is that P3 systems less than 800MHz in speed tended to have BIOS issues. Some of them had issues with bigger hard drives (something like 24G or 32G was a limit) and they had other flakeyness. I've got a couple of P3-1GHz systems in my collection for use as routers and small servers. Recent versions of clamav have got memory hungry so 512M is about the minimum for a small mail server with a full anti-spam configuration which means that P3 desktop systems (which were all limited to 512M of RAM) will soon be unsuitable as mail servers. Such P3 systems tend to use less than 40W while relatively idle (IE hard drive is still spinning etc but it isn't under much load). http://doc.coker.com.au/environment/computer-power-use/ I've also got a small collection of Celeron 2.4GHz systems which draw 50W with a single 300G disk. Those systems can take up to 2G of RAM (enough for a small Xen server) and can take SATA disks (if I needed something bigger than the 200G IDE disks in my collection). http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/05/22/xen-and-swap/ My first Linux server had 4M of RAM back in late 1992 or early 1993. But when I tested in 2008 I couldn't even get a Debian virtual machine to boot with less than 13M of RAM. I suspect that Debian has become bigger since then. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_chipset So I guess that anything from Intel that's designed for the desktop and is less than a Pentium-Pro is useless for running Linux nowadays. Those systems which were stupidly limited to 64M of RAM (like most Pentium systems) aren't going to be very useful nowadays. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/