We cleaned out our warehouse the other day and found an old Pentium 2 400MHz IBM. I decided to grab it and stick in the server room for fun. My boss wants to know what I plan on doing with it. Just was curious if anyone knew of something useful we could use running linux on that old guy. Also what is a good OS for something of that speed and majesty?

We already have a L.A.M.P. server, and nagios box running here at the shop. We have considered Smoothwall/IPCOP, but putting that on this IBM would serious affect our pipe to the outside world.

Current suggestions floating around here.

Is just install some flavor of linux and lock the screensaver and tell everyone (non technical) that it is very important and never turn it off.

Hold Mahjongg tournament on lunch breaks.

So let me know what crazy or serious thing we could do with this "very important" piece of government equipment.

Thanks
Ben

Well Slackware is a good suggestion for a lightweight Linux distro for your elderly PC. As for what to do with it, well you could run folding@home, seti@home or something.

If it has to be work-related, you could always tell him that a sandbox server is good idea for testing new ideas and applications. If it breaks, nobody will notice, and you'll learn how not to do something.

Your idea of internet filtering isn't too bad on such a machine. A base install of something like Slack or Debian, with a basic Squid + SquidGuard/DansGuardian wouldn't hurt your Internet pipe all that much and should pretty decent, depending on how much net traffic you have. With internet filtering and the other suggestions of Seti/Folding/etc.@home, it depends more on how much memory you have.
Alternatively, stick a basic KDE setup on and run the Matrix screensaver. I left that running for a year in a server rack and always looked impressive - I told people it monitored the whole network. Can't remember what it actually did, but it wasn't much!