Litle dirty web server project !
 

Hey guys !

It`s been some time since i`ve been posting around here, guess life had taken over me for quite a while now, been through a lot of health problems, surgery and nasty stuff like that, wich in the end made me come up with this crazy idea. I was just surfing around older threads regarding 486 users or similar. Well, i have to say that did it for me ! I just managed to revive an 166Mhz CPU, 32 MB ram, 1.6 GB HDD baby in just a few hours like if it was new. I first tried out installing win98 the old fashioned way with the floppy boot disk and all that, worked as a charm. Then i installed sound and everything worked. But then I wondered, is it posible to turn this tiger in something useful? So i contacted a friend and asked him if he woul wanna help me in a new project to turn this 486 into a webserver that will host a new Linux User Group (LUG) website wich we will write from scratch in html and php. My steps in creating all this would be :

1. My first bet was to install slackware 10.1 as the main OS
2. We would want to install apache and php and maybe SQL for some database
3. Use VSFTP server for easy FTP access
4. Use OpenSSH for simple remote access

My question for you guys is, cand you see this working? I mean, will this puppy survive the ride?

I will put a 20GB new HDD tommorow for extra space, but I am still questioning the pc`s power to compute with 32 mb RAM and 166 mhz proc. What do you think, will it work?

Yeah, in the sense that horses swim and chickens fly :)

Dunno about current slack but DSL should run on anything from a 486DX with 16MB and up. 32MB RAM will always be your bottleneck so if you can get more then get more. One thing to consider is that even moderately newer HW is way more efficient in every aspect and less likely to wear out relative to this old junk hardware.

Could you detail you`re statement ? :D

Well, I will not offer an opinion on your particular case... but I can offer encouragement!

I run older hardware almost exclusively, and I still have 4 Sharp notebooks with 120Mhz CPU and 32Mb RAM that see regular use! The OS has not been updated for a long while, they are all running Mandrake 7.2.

But I long ago cloned a package repo and updated several important packages over the years - and they keep going!

I am not so sure of your own choices and intended use - but I am sure that you can keep that old box alive for as long as you need to! Good luck!

I did state I will be using Slackware as old as 10.1 or earlier, in wich i have seen stated in many posts regarding the usage of these OS`s on 486 or similar hardware and working fine without a Xwm wich i will not need at all.

This is just something i am doing for fun, and see it as a learning curve also, it isn`t something to be taken dead serious, but still, i could try at least, practice and trial and error can`t do me bad could it ?

I mean, don`t get me wrong, i am planning in hosting a bare bone raw html website with 2 or 3 pages for a start, not any fancy stuff. Just to see how it would cope.

I have run Apache/PHP from those 120Mhz notebooks without problems. In fact, one of them was my first Apache/PHP/MySQL web server! Of course, the software versions were all of that vintage and traffic level was never an issue - but it served some pretty good depth of dynamic content as well as being a development platform!

So as long as you are aware of the limits, you should be able to make something useful of it!

Are you sure you want to use Slackware 10? This is a notice Pat put on some Slackware versions that are now going to officially stop being maintained:

12.1 and above will still be supported.

I`m sure 12.1 isn`t an option for that kind of hardware, this still will be something personal, nothing public, just something we can play around and learn while we`re at it. I can`t think of a stable and familiar distro that can suite my needs right now, DSL is just old and unsupported, slack has this great community where you can get help 24/7 regardless of the version you are running, so as long as we got you guys, i`m happy :D

I think when it comes to keeping these old boxes going you have to accept that you are going to need to work with unsupported software versions. Security updates are pretty low on the list at this point.

That said, if it is web facing it does still need to be on the list - just depends on intended use and what the exposure might be.

Exactly !

If your goal is to learn how to build, run and maintain an LAMP stack why hobble yourself with such underpowered hardware when you can find Pentium boxes with a couple of hundred MiB of RAM for give-a-way prices. Or set up a free tier AWS instance on Amazon's cloud. You can run it for a year free (or nearly so) and have to deal with real world admin issues. Trying to make a 486 fly is a waste of time in my opinion. Now if you just want to be able to say "I did it!", well that's OK. Go for it. Nothing wrong with having a liltte good clean fun.

DNA
AKA mrascii

I am not sure of Bller's reasons for reviving the old box, but sometimes old hardware close at hand is the only option - I know all too well!

I see frequent references to "give away prices" on older hardware, but find such things to be far less available than that would imply when I actually try to obtain it!

And I disagree about it being a waste of time. If those old, slow CPU cycles can produce something of value for him, then let the clock run!

And if anyone has a few pieces of still useful old hardware on the way to the landfill, you know where to find me! ;)